CLASSIC BLIGHTED BY BRUTAL SOUND
Excellent Rebecca Storm deserved to be heard without a distortion-plagued opening night in a show that has proven itself over and over again
IHAVE rarely endured such an awful sound balance as the one operating on this production’s opening night. It was as if the drums, keyboard and woodwind section were tuned to compete at full volume with the onstage performers.
The Narrator( Richard Munday), a kind of latter-day Greek chorus, has a key role in sustaining the sense of doom in the story, but he often had a battle to be heard above the blitz from the pit.
It was a shame because, at its best, Blood Brothers has enough emotional firepower to make you overlook the melodramatic plot and engage with the genuine human issues involved.
The cast, led by the redoubtable Rebecca Storm, who has had an extraordinary 30 years’ experience in the role of Mrs Johnstone, was generally first class and deserved to be heard without the brutal sound distortion.
The story is a parable on the theme that selling your soul to the devil is a bad deal: and Mrs Johnstone, deserted hard-up wife with seven children, and pregnant with twins, has reluctantly signed up for it.
She agrees to hand over one of the twins to the childless upperclass Mrs Lyons (Paula Tappenden) – a secret never to be revealed of course. Some hope.
Writer/composer Willy Russell’s unapologetically political musical has a very tight script, getting a lot of information into snappy scenes while telling the story of the separated twins from children to early adults.
There’s a whole dictionary of themes to play with: poverty, unemployment, drugs, jealousy, broken dreams, class distinction, the old debate between nature and nurture and superstition tied to psychological pressure.
Religion is never mentioned, but all the indicators are that we’re in the Catholic area of the 1960s Liverpool divide.
Inevitably, corners have to be cut in telling the story of the twins (non-identical despite the lyrics) over 20 years. They’re well contrasted, if more than a little stereotyped.
Mickey is a lovable Scouser, full of innocent fun and frolic: Eddie is the comfortably brought-up, naive, well-behaved, posh kid, eager to be friendly with working class vitality when he accidentally encounters it.
The two kids click as pals and from then on it’s the slippery slope to disaster.
Russell hasn’t made all the Johnstone kids lovable rogues: older son Sammy is a nasty bit of goods, but as the Narrator ultimately spells it out, class distinction is the villain of the piece, along with the hyper-neurotic Mrs Lyons who’s so afraid of her child grabbing deal being uncovered that she’s a psychological time bomb. Although Willy Russell’s heart is clearly with the old music hall song: ‘It’s the poor wot gets the blame,
‘It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure, ‘Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame.’
It’s not all gloom and doom however. There’s plenty of unsophisticated, hectic humour in the childhood years and the fumblings of adolescent sexuality, but the scene with the priapic judge is crude humour of the dirty picture postcard variety. There are echoes of Oscar Hammerstein’s dramatic technique in the song I’m Not Saying a Word, and in the whopping tearjerker finale Tell Me It’s Not True. The cynical Narrator’s ominous prediction that ‘the devil’s got your number’, is regularly doled out, while he spells out the lot of the married woman, ‘who swopped her dreams for drudgery the day she was a bride’.
And the Marilyn Monroe song is cleverly used throughout to express the fluctuations in Mrs Johnstone’s fortunes. There’s a tuneful gloom about all the tunes, but the 2-hour 40-minute running time could be improved with some pruning of lesser songs.
‘It’s a parable on the theme that selling your soul to the devil is a bad deal’