This diamond is a musical lover’s best friend
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
★★★★✩
Union Theatre, London SE1 (Tickets: 020 7261 9876/ uniontheatre.biz; £20-£22)
THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT
★★✩✩✩
Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2 (Tickets 0844 4825151/ wyndhamstheatre.co.uk; £17.50£127.50)
GROAN UPS
★★✩✩✩ Vaudeville Theatre, London WC2 (Tickets: 0330 3334814/ nimaxtheatres.com; £20-£75)
THANK heavens for the London Fringe! After watching two witlesswest End comedies (see below!), I went to the tiny Union Theatre in Southwark where a dedicated team of young performers, guided by an experienced director, designer and choreographer, are presenting a delightful and stylish revival of the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
The success of the 1953 film, where Marilyn Monroe sang the classic gold-digger’s creed: Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend, has eclipsed that of the stage musical, which has received only one London revival since the original 1962 production with Dora Bryan.this is a pity, because it is full of sharp repartee, larger-than-life but credible characters and splendid songs.
True, like Zza Zza Gabor’s celebrated cri de coeur: “I want a man who’s kind and understanding – is that too much to ask of a millionaire?”, Lorelei Lee’s mercenary quest may offend feminist sensibilities. But she embarks on it with such breezy candour that less censorious souls will cheer her on.
Abigayle Honeywill has too small a voice for some of her big numbers but invests Lorelei with an alluring mixture of determination and naivety. She skilfully deepens the character, revealing the pain behind the effervescent smile when she describes shooting a predatory boss in her home town.
She receives sterling support from Eleanor Lakin as her room-mate Dorothy (an equally attractive brunette) and Aaron Bannister-davies, Freddie King and George Lennan as the three millionaires in their lives. Sasha Regan’s elegant, fleet production is graced by
Zak Nemorin’s inventive choreography – nowhere more so than in a sporting routine for a chorus of US Olympic hopefuls: the campest athletes this side of the Gay Games.
Sean Foley’s adaptation of the Ealing comedy is camp in all the wrong ways.the original film was released in 1951 when Britain, in the grip of post-war austerity, was discovering both the potential of new industrial methods and the dangers they posed to the underlying social fabric.
Sidney Stratton is an industrial chemist who devises a formula for a revolutionary form of cloth that will never wear out, stain or lose its shape. At first this is hailed as a new dawn for textile production. Slowly however both bosses and workers see that it will have a disastrous effect on profits and jobs, and they conspire to destroy the invention.
In 2011 Foley successfully adapted another Ealing Comedy,the Ladykillers. Lightning has not struck twice.what on screen was a charming fantasy of industrial relations has on stage become a crude pantomime padded out with skiffle songs featuring half-baked rhymes such as “He’s got a dream/
He’s going to make the world sparkling clean”.
The dialogue is equally feeble. I laughed once, when a mill owner (Richard Cordery) declared: “Don’t think of me as your boss, Sidney.think of me as a friend who can still sack you if things go wrong.” The nadir is reached with an inapposite reference to the proroguing of Parliament, implicitly evoking Brexit.
The acting is on a par with the script. Stephen Mangan makes surprisingly little impression as Sidney.as his love interest, Kara Tointon appears to have modelled her cut-glass accent less on Baroness Thatcher than on a Thatcher impersonator.with the honourable exceptions of Richard Durden and Sue Johnston (who shone in everything from The Royle Family to Downton Abbey), the entire cast shouts.
FURTHER disappointment comes in Groan Ups from Mischief Theatre – the collective behind The Play That Goes Wrong, a title that might sum up their latest work.the group’s talents lie in their inventive stagecraft of which there is little evidence here, not in the writing of sustained characters, plot or even jokes.
Groan Ups depicts the relationships of five ill-assorted friends at the ages of six, 14 and 30.The first scene, where they play six-year-olds re-enacting their weekend activities is excruciating, full of sickening sexual innuendo. Things improve slightly when, with one exception, the children hit puberty, although the attempt at pathos through a sensitive boy’s unexpressed love for his beefy classmate is merely mawkish.
The second half, in which the friends, now adults, return for a school reunion, is preferable, if only because the actors are now playing their own ages.amid further unamusing visual jokes, such as the repeated squashing of the class hamster, there is one genuine comic creation of a would-be actress (enchantingly played by Bryony Corrigan), hired by the class nerd to pose as his girlfriend.