On The Town

Music: Leonard Bernstein Book and lyrics: Betty Comden and Adolph Green Director and choreographer: Drew Mconie

“If it’s deluxe new versions of big and balletic Broadway musicals you’re after, London is spoiling us this summer,” said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Hugely enjoyable revivals of An American in Paris and 42nd Street are wowing the West End. And now Regent’s Park has given us a “lavish and imaginative rendering” of this 1944 musical (best known from the 1949 Gene Kelly/frank Sinatra film) about three “horny sailors” determined to make the most of their 24 hours of shore leave in New York City. These “bell-bottomed buddies” are out to “seize the day and to lasso the night” – and director Drew Mconie “ensures that they do it in style”.

This cracking revival certainly hasn’t cut any corners, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. “It looks exquisite and sounds gorgeous,” with the hard-working 15-strong band rising to the “bravura challenge” of Bernstein’s score, with its “clarinet siren wails, clownish shifts of tempo, and thrilling collision of Jazz Age dreaminess with bombardments of brass”. The tireless company of 27 execute Mconie’s dazzling dance numbers with aplomb: from the moment a “sextet of matelots come a-leaping into the Brooklyn dockyard”, conjured up by designer Peter Mckintosh’s imposing metal structure, “there’s barely any let-up”. You will, admittedly, “go hungry for drama”; the plot is not so much slender as nonexistent. But you are unlikely to see a finer account of this show.

New York, as they sing in this musical, is “a helluva town” – and this “breezy, joyful navy lark is a helluva lot of fun”, said Lyn Gardner in The Guardian. As the trio of sailors, Samuel Edwards, Jacob Maynard and Danny Mac (of Strictly Come Dancing fame) dance athletically and are “immensely likeable”. But it’s the women who really shine. As Ivy, Siena Kelly “dances every step as if her life depends on it”. Lizzy Connolly is hilarious as Hildy, notably in the “sexually ravenous” number I Can Cook Too. And Miriam-teak Lee “ratchets up the comedy” as anthropologist Claire de Loon.