Anne-marie Duff brings charisma and chutzpah to this glam revival
★★★★★
Abit like the country at large right now, director Josie Rourke is in a welcome holiday humour. She’s bowing out from running the Donmar Warehouse after seven hard-toiling, creatively fertile years – during which time hits have included Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus, The Vote
(James Graham’s daring real-time drama about democracy in action) and Phyllida Lloyd’s trailblazing all-female
Shakespeare trilogy.
Not for Rourke, though, the serious, Shakespearean swansong of her lauded male predecessors, Sam Mendes (Twelfth Night) and Michael Grandage (Richard II). Her irreverent parting shot is a big musical in a small space, a contained riot of song and dance – and one which gives a relatively late “break” to Anne-marie Duff who, well into her 40s, is here making her musical debut in a leading role as demanding as any.
Sweet Charity is about one of New York’s hard-bitten female dancers for hire; this means of faux-dating for fellas was back in vogue (with sleazier overtones) at the time (1966) that the musical adaptation of Fellini’s film
Nights of Cabiria hit Broadway. Cy Coleman contributed the lush score, Neil Simon transferred the story to Manhattan, and evergreen lyrical wit was supplied by Dorothy Fields.
Rourke’s revival encapsulates the gaiety and glamour (but also the grubbiness) of that swinging decade (the show’s biggest banker, song-wise, is Big Spender). Designer Robert Jones coats the Donmar walls in silver foil
– drawing inspiration from the so-called silver age of Andy Warhol’s Factory period and there’s even a campy-vampy dance sequence of Warhol lookalikes.
The point is made that this is an age of impersonal surface and disposable chic in which romantic individualism has to fight its corner.
Our brassy heroine, Charity Hope Valentine, yearns to find love despite umpteen brushes with disappointment, the latest of which we see at the start.
You may already have had a slight sinking feeling, though. In a recent interview, the actress likened finetuning her voice to “getting an old car out of a garage … oiling it and getting the rust off ”. Not all the rust has been scraped off. At times, it’s like listening to sandpaper. The contrast in vocal polish to Adrian Lester – the first in a series of cameo turns in the roofraising role of churchman Daddy Brubeck (who sings Rhythm of Life)
– was glaring on opening night. But not, finally, shaming. This is still a coherent, charismatic and chutzpahpowered performance.
Duff convinces as someone trapped in a world of predatory masculinity, debauchery an economic necessity, sex commodified – who yet retains a girlish optimism amid all the worldly cynicism.
She slots in among her abrasive fellow Fandango Ballroom taxidancers, (whom choreographer Wayne Mcgregor – honouring the Bob Fosse template – has pouting and dominatrix-posturing like mannequins on a revolve).
“I’m gonna get up, get out” this archetypal survivor affirms as she picks herself off the floor at the end, hankering for new adventure: an apt line to see Rourke off at the finale of what has been, despite straitened times, a golden period.
Until June 8. Tickets: 020 3282 3808; www.donmarwarehouse.com