Psychodrama is a good excuse to revisit jazz-funk and have a party
There isn’t a feel-bad bone in Five
Guys Named Moe. The jukebox musical, which showcases the songs of the jazz and R’N’B pioneer Louis Jordan, was first seen at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1990 before Cameron Mackintosh picked it up for the West End. It won awards, went to Broadway, made a lot of money. Now it’s back in a new production directed by its creator – and star of TV drama The Wire – Clarke Peters, modishly situated in a pop-up tent at Marble Arch.
Jordan, born in Arkansas, lived a colourful life, marrying five times and taking swing to the brink of rock ’n’ roll. Where would Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis have been without him?
But this is not his story. Instead his songs are harnessed to tell the tale of a chancer, Nomax (played with shambolic humour by Edward Baruwa), who has treated his lady wrong and wants to win her back. You might describe it as a supernatural psychodrama because, as Nomax collapses into an alcohol-fuelled stupor, five ghostly jazz-meisters all called Moe – Big Moe, Know Moe, Little Moe, Four-eyed Moe and Eat Moe (you guessed it, he’s the funny one) – explode from his furniture and hold him to task for his iniquities and teach him the ways of romantic righteousness.
But psychodrama is too exalted a term for what we get. It’s just a darned good excuse to revisit some serious jazz-funk and try to conjure up a party atmosphere. We’re forever being asked, with the threat of being hauled up on stage to join in, “Y’all having a good time tonight?”
By and large we were, in a setting pimped up to resemble a jazz venue, with bar tables in the pit in front of the stage and a circular walkway allowing the Moes to dance around the audience.
The choreography by Andrew Wright is a mixture of slick, relaxed and witty; the singing is accomplished; the dancing and acrobatics at times breathtaking (take a bow Dex Lee for some wince-making splits); the music, by a five-man and one-woman band, on the money (the evening was worth it for me for a sax solo by Jessamy Holder on Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying). The plot is nugatory. But no matter. Focus on Jordan and his effortless lyrical gift: “Those other chicks leave me cold/you can’t compare brass to 14 carat gold/after they made her they broke the mold/ Cause she’s reet, petite and gone.”