Once it was Steele, but 50 years on it’s pure gold
Half a Sixpence Chichester Festival Theatre
Flash, Bang, Wallop! What a turnup for the books! Half a Sixpence, the larky musical that catapulted Tommy Steele into a different showbiz league over half a century ago, has been enhanced, re-sized, had all its blemishes removed and now looks pretty close to perfection.
Someone – producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh, surely, who has had a close hand in this revival – should stick it pronto in the West End, where it hasn’t been seen since its initial 1963 run.
Take a bow Julian Fellowes – he of Downton Abbey fame – who has done a sterling job scripting a new book, finding richer dramatic pickings in the 1905 HG Wells novel Kipps, and re- organising the story so that it no longer seems a broken-backed affair on stage. A bouquet apiece for composer George Stiles and lyricist Anthony Drewe, who have diligently buffed-up David Heneker’s charmingcatchy numbers and brilliantly supplemented them at every turn.
And above all, sending the audience into raptures, bid hello to 22-year-old star-in-the-making Charlie Stemp, a huge find for director Rachel Kavanaugh and her team: taking the lead of Arthur Kipps he follows effortlessly in Steele’s footsteps and, in one athletic bound, makes the part all his own.
He’s got a grin so broad and warm you feel you’re basking by the seaside. This version sharpens the identity crisis that ensues when this Folkestone draper’s assistant moves, like a male Eliza Doolittle, from a below-stairs world to the upper echelons, drawn from his childhood sweetheart Ann (Devon-Elise Johnson) into the orbit of the middle-class Helen Walsingham (Emma Williams), whose hard-up snob of a mother is angling for a match.
The evening, faultlessly served by a first-rate ensemble, delivers the predictable romantic conclusion that it’s love that makes the world go round, but its success lies in relaying the agonies for all concerned in the love-triangle without short-changing us of abounding comic joy.
The score is a potent blend of saloon-bar knees-ups, seductive hints of Edwardian ballroom waltzes and the oom-pah brass sounds of a bandstand (nicely referenced in Paul Brown’s discreetly sophisticated design).
Flash, Bang, Wallop, the uproarious wedding-photo jamboree and bestknown number, now sits at the end of the night, and raises the roof. But it has stiff competition: not least from Pick Out a Simple Tune, which sees “Artie” pluck at his banjo at a stultifying posh party and so galvanise the surrounding toffs that they join in, bashing the silverware and even swinging off the chandeliers.
Bravo! If the first incarnation of this show was all Steele, this one’s pure gold.