Quaint love story that’s a ditzy delight
A Damsel In Distress (Festival Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: Old-fashioned pleasure ★★★★✩
THERE are perhaps only two words for this show: one is delightful and the other is ditzy. You cannot pin an ounce of substance on the musical based on P. G. Wodehouse’s novel with songs by George and Ira Gershwin that was turned into a 1937 film starring Fred Astaire.
It’s blissfully brainless, with frivolous gags, frothy tunes, terrific tap dancing and a preposterous story. That story is both simple and impossible to relate in full.
American musical theatre maestro George Bevan (Richard Fleeshman here; Astaire in the film) is in London staging a West End show when he runs into charmingly bossy debutante Maud (Summer Strallen). Her dragon of an aunt (Isla Blair) means to marry her to an upper-class twit, but our hero George pursues his ‘damsel in distress’ to the family pile. So begins a medieval romance.
The humour is somewhat antique, so writers Jeremy Sams and Robert Hudson point it towards the 21st century. But do not fear that they trample on Wodehouse’s wit.
They merely sprinkle the whole thing with the lightest of double entendre, such as clipping the tweedy Aunt’s box hedge. Indeed, it is the prime accomplishment of Rob Ashford’s production that it preserves all i ts giddy innocence. Perhaps he is afraid of breaking any piece of a confection that has all the delicacy of a china tea set. But it would be wrong to fix what is plainly not bust.
His choreography provides blue-sky levity, excelling in tap numbers where one click out of place could bring down the house of dancing cards. My favourite was the French Pastry Walk,
where our French chef orchestrates a parade of desserts and a shivering jelly.
The Gershwin tunes keep things fizzing along beautifully, skipping lightly from Nice Work If You Can Get It to Stiff Upper Lip. The only soulful note is in Fleeshman’s romantic rendition of A Foggy Day (made famous by Ella Fitzgerald).
Christopher Oram’s stocky castle set has the look of a fibreglass, end- of-pier attraction, setting a tone that puts frolick-some fun before elegant chic.
Nicholas Farrell is a hoot as the elderly, pink-chopped lord of the manor, whose rose-growing and pig-rearing skills win the heart of Sally Ann Triplett as the American musical starlet. Fleeshman’s George, meanwhile, keeps it squeaky- clean. And Strallen is a finishing school filly, able to leap up onto a parapet and strike a Pre-Raphaelite pose without missing a beat.
Desmond Barrit of fe r s amusing cod gravitas as the orotund Butler, but it’s Isla Blair who steals the show as Lady Caroline Byng: not so much a battle-axe as a trussed-up battle bus, with one hand on an elephant gun and the other on her beloved Borzoi.
Finally, I must mention Richard Dempsey, who plays the upper- class twit who squeaks when excited, and Melle Stewart as the Girl Guide-ish maid he adores.
But there is, as it were, strong batting throughout the order.