He’s as wooden as a log cabin, but Aled’s still a festive hit
NOVEMBER may only be a fortnight old, but they have already opened irving Berlin’s White Christmas on the West End. it has a big-band orchestra and Aled Jones in the Bing Crosby role of Bob Wallace, the former army captain crooner with a slow-melting romance.
Welcome to Vermont, folks, and it’s comin’ up for Christmas 1954. After the requisite faffing about between Bob and glamorous Betty (Rachel Stanley), grandmothers’ favourite Aled goes in for a kiss.
He approaches the lass with all the tentativity of a space probe docking with the mother ship. Finally lips are locked. ‘Ooooooooh!’ goes an audience full of 60-something ladies, sucking hard on their barley sugars. Then comes ripples of laughter, as if they don’t half envy that Rachel for getting her smackers on ex-choirboy Aled.
Some will possibly write off this show as frightful tooth rot. in some ways they will have a point, for its plot is creaky, the characterisation is two-dimensional, and its sentimentalism is at times close to cynical.
Add to that some dicey amplification at the start of the show, when even those of us in the stalls struggled to hear what was being said — only for the first couple of songs to be way too loud in volume. Whoaa!
Yet the Berlin score, the dancing, the swanky sets, the seasonal corn: i confess they got to me in the end. Tooth rot or not, i quite enjoyed it. And so did the audience, very much. The producers have gone into this with a sure idea of their middle-aged (and possibly under-13s) market and they deliver the goods for anyone wanting a night of old-fashioned, melody-laden, spangly costumed American schmaltz.
Mr Jones’s Bob is a showbiz star with his ex-army mate Phil (smiley, slim-hipped Tom Chambers). it is December when they meet a couple of cute showgirls (Miss Stanley and sweetie-pie Louise Bowden) and pursue them to supposedly snowy Vermont, which is in fact having a heatwave. Global warming must have started earlier than we thought.
The girls have been hired to sing at a failing hotel. The hotel just happens — well, how about that! — to be run by Bob and Phil’s former General (Graham Cole). Soon, a ruse is hatched to save the hotel from its debtors and have a swell party at the same time.
Can our Aled do an American accent? Nope. Can he sing and dance and hold on to his white trilby at the same time? Er, he wears the hat like a baker and some of his limb movements are as wooden as a Vermont cabin.
HE IS at his best when he opens his lungs, lowers his stiff chin on to his chest, and lets rip with his semiclassical tenor. The love song Count Your Blessings is an irresistible weepie in the first half.
He does look a little as though he is suffering from indigestion when he sings but we must not let that be a problem, for he becomes his own man and the voice is a lot better than his acting. The show’s humour is unsarcastic, sweetly upbeat, relying on caricatures such as the monosyllabic barn hand Ezekiel (Phil Cole) and the hotel receptionist with a big-blast singing voice (Wendi Peters of Coronation Street fame).
Add a precocious granddaughter, lots of the General’s former soldiers turning up, the tap- dancing number i Love A Piano and, finally, breathless word that it has started to snow. The barn door is opened and we see a backdrop of an idealised, all-American snowscape. Aw!
ironic sophisticates will find their pleasures elsewhere, but simple souls such as your critic tottered out of the Dominion feeling Crimbo’d up, ready for sleigh bells and the year 1955.