FROM HERE TO ETERNITY ★★★★
Charing Cross Theatre until December 17 Tickets: 08444 930 650
Tim Rice and Stuart Brayson’s musical received a lukewarm reception on its London premiere in 2013. This new production, which debuted in the US in 2016, is lean, mean and stripped to kill.
Based on the James Jones novel and subsequent Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra movie, it follows the Hawaii-based soldiers of G Company two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Restless and itching for action, their main concern is an imminent boxing tournament.
Their captain Holmes (Alan Turkington), who is turning a blind eye to his frustrated wife Karen’s (Carley Stenson) affair with his second-in-command Warden (Adam Rhys-Charles), longs for his unit to win the tournament, not least because it would earn him a promotion.
But their unit lacks a talented boxer. Then newcomer Prewitt (Jonathon Bentley) arrives, trailing a reputation as a superb soldier and former boxer. But as he refuses to fight, the temperature rises.
Rice’s lyrics are tough and clever with trace echoes of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific but sharpened to a more macho edge.
Brayson’s music keeps faith with the period – blues, jazz, torch ballads – and is well integrated into the martial milieu.
The atmosphere simmers with barely suppressed violence and not-at-allsuppressed sex. A well-drilled Brit cast under US director Brett Smock is convincing as US soldiers who can sing and do push-ups at the same time.
Eve Polycarpou is all cynical swagger as local brothel madam Mrs Kipfer, while Desmonda Cathabel’s fatalistic prostitute Lorene and Jonny Amies as smartmouthed Maggio add weight and texture to the ensemble.
Tough and tender, it is laced with sensuality and period attitudes to homosexuality that are deliberately discomfiting. A damn fine bit of kit.