Take a punt on plucky new musical
Miss Nightingale
I’m not exhorting people to go forth and gamble, but anyone over the age of 18 who finds themselves in the centre of town with time to spare should pop along to the Hippodrome.
After this Frank Matcham-designed palace of pleasure was reopened as a casino in 2012 it looked like its status as a West End theatrical venue had ended. Yet the conversion was done with such finesse that it also gives a magnificent sense of what the space was once like: you can picture the circus spectacles of yesteryear.
Seek out the 180-seat cabaret upstairs, and this month you’re further provided with a costlier but less Mammonite proposition. Miss
Nightingale, Matthew Bugg’s original musical set in Blitz-worn London, has done the rounds since it premiered at the King’s Head pub theatre in 2011.
Given that it’s about a plucky singerentertainer in the Gracie Fields mould, has it now found its ideal home in this venue, which launched in 1900 with a music hall revue? After a fashion.
Although the ambience is perfect, the evening has been stretched beyond its original 90 minutes to more than two hours, adding songs but little dramatic depth. And while there’s no doubting the accomplishment of the pastiche score – a hint of Weimar, a dash of Coward, lots of cheeky chappy, innuendo-laden ditties in between – a sense of déjà vu and déjà entendu in.
As the spirited northerner, Lauren Chinery has enough charisma and élan to keep you watching all the same, gradually finding her stage confidence. Miss N’s best friend, the Polish Jewish refugee George (Matthew Floyd Jones), and her club’s effete aristocratic owner, Frank (Oliver Mawdsley), get engaged in a furtive homosexual liaison that reflects the period’s aggressive prejudices and there’s even a sobering mention of The Telegraph’s 1942 scoop about Hitler’s gas chambers.
Cut it down and maybe tart it up, too, and it could be a palpable hit.