Seven Brides is sexist, silly ...and still sensational
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (Open Air Theatre) Verdict: A thigh-slapping hoot
BEST known from the 1954 film starring Jane Powell and Howard Keel, Seven Brides must be the most cheerfully sexist of all musicals.
Perhaps that’s why it’s still so much fun: everyone can throw off their masks of political correctness and get down to some wholesome apple-pie song and dance in the story of seven lumberjack brothers who kidnap seven blushing brides.
The big task f or Rachel Kavanaugh’s production is to turn the chauvinism into a charmingly innocent caper. One part of this is making sure Laura Pitt-Pulford, as mother hen Milly, is suitably bossy teaching table manners and dancing to the benighted boys in the Rocky mountains.
Yet she also manages to be a sweet, forgiving washerwoman, patiently indulging her husband Adam who tricked her into skivvying for his neolithic siblings.
As Adam, Alex Gaumond could do with a bit more John Wayne. Instead, he’s one of those tall rangy musical theatre actors with a big toothpaste smile that lights up the campery of Kavanaugh’s production.
He and the six brothers are more like a clutch of pin-up boys inside their birds nest wigs. Kavanaugh even has the bashful oiks give gifts to their brides to say ‘aw shucks’ and sorry for kidnapping them.
Sexism aside, set in Regent’s Park’s leafy bower it’s a thigh-slapping hoot served on Peter McKintosh’s log cabin set with Gene De Paul’s hearty music.
There is also barn-blitzing choreography from Alistair David, with lumberjack routines including an axe-wielding break dance and a cartwheeling hoedown that ends in a cod-IKEA flat-pack barn-building competition that’s as bonkers as it is raucous.
The bovine boys are greeted like a flock of George Clooneys by the gaggle of squealing, giggling girlies i n pretty pastel frocks.
It’s thoroughbred nonsense and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms by gender equality activists. But my 11-year-old daughter, steeped in the catechism of anti-discrimination, didn’t bat an eyelid. She loved every minute.