Brash and brassy, but with a heart of pure gold
IT’S a steamy night at the Fandango club, with the dance hostesses thrusting and beckoning, belting out Big Spender.
It’s business, not love. Except for little Charity Hope Valentine, who soldiers on trustfully seeking true love, armed only with a cracking voice and unquenchable humour.
Gemma Sutton in the title role is a pocket phenomenon, sweetfaced and resolutely optimistic, in contrast to her taller, mockingly comradely colleagues (flamehaired Vivien Carter, as sarcastic, sardonic Nickie, is one to watch).
Paul Hart’s cast is an ever moving orchestra of actormusicians: sexy on sax, foxy on flute, tearing it up on trumpet.
There are neat musical jokes: an instrument suddenly handed to a character in the nick of time for their solo; bad boyfriend Charlie with a piccolo as Charity follows him round the stage like one of the Pied Piper’s rats.
When I saw it in the West End, my companion left at the interval, saying that musicals were all very well but ‘why must they make a song and dance about everything?’ She had a point.
For all its brassy exuberance, the first half keeps erupting into big numbers without moving the story on, except for an empty farcical sequence where Charity hides in a film star’s closet.
But the love story develops with geeky boyfriend Oscar, as mirrored walls roll us from place to place, making us a club audience or comrades in the dressing room.
In the 1957 Fellini film, the heroine was a streetwalker, ‘fragile, tender and unfortunate’. Neil Simon’s cleverness is in making her funny and tougher, laughing at ‘the fickle finger of fate’, bobbing up like a cork in a swamp of gropey men.
Although Hart has updated it to now, it hardly needs that. Girls will always get ‘stuck in the flypaper of life’. Here’s to them all.