A helluva show – or a helluva bore?
I t took almost 20 years for Leonard Bernstein’s breakthrough dance musical of 1944, hymning the joys of youth and the wonders of New York, to make it across the Atlantic to London. By which point Britain was in the grip of Beatlemania and the world that On the Town evoked – of sailors on leave, looking to see the sights and grab some amorous action in a frantic 24 hours – had a sepia tint to it.
“In two words: too late,” sniffed the Daily Mail. That West End premiere production lasted only 63 performances, and, since then, On the
Town has only occasionally cropped up, although its signature number,
New York, New York, ranks as one of the Big Apple’s most enduring anthems. Now, in a nostalgia-craving period when we’re rushing to embrace reassuring musical visions of America at its most get-up-and-go (vide An
American in Paris and 42nd Street), are we perhaps perfectly positioned to appreciate its old-fashioned charms?
Well, yes and no. I can’t see anyone complaining that this Open Air revival by director-choreographer Drew Mconie has cut corners.
It looks exquisite, and sounds gorgeous, rising to the bravura challenge of the score with its clarinet siren wails, clownish shifts of tempo and thrilling collision of jazz age dreaminess with bombardments of brass. There’s a tireless company of 27, an equally industrious band of 15 and, while nothing could match the star-power of the 1949 MGM film (which boasted Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra), the casting of Strictly Come Dancing finalist Danny Mac isn’t bad going, nor is the presence of Maggie Steed in the minor comic role of addled singing-teacher Madame Dilly.
What the evening captures splendidly is the adventurous fluidity of the piece; the way skittish incidents bleed into full-on dance numbers, holding a fun-fair mirror up to the circus of Manhattan. From the moment a sextet of matelots come a-leaping into the Brooklyn dockyard nicely conjured by designer Peter Mckintosh using an imposing metal structure, there’s barely any let-up.
But, although it summons the energy of the city that never sleeps, it’s also faintly exhausting to watch – and with a storyline powered principally by hormones, you can go hungry for drama, even if Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s lyrics remain remarkably spry and amusing. In the ballet-steeped second half, I oscillated between finding it a helluva show and a helluva bore.
Will you see a much finer account of it, though? Mac is terrific as the wideeyed, wholesome Gabey, hankering across town after the seemingly unobtainable Ivy Green (Siena Kelly).
There’s great work too from the last-minute stand-in Jacob Maynard as Chip, half-fending-off Lizzy Connolly’s droll and lusty cab-driver Hildy. Mconie pointedly adds a shadowy, sultry-sorrowful male-on-male pas de deux for poignant measure too. Very charming, all told, then, but not irresistibly so.