Modern revival worth cherishing
Sweet Charity Watermill Theatre, Newbury
★★★★★
Neil Simon hummed and hawed about Sweet Charity. On the one hand, it was a slam-dunk hit, confirming his reputation (post
Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple) as the golden boy of Sixties Broadway. On the other, he could see its deficiencies.
“I felt that I did the best I could with material that didn’t really suit me,” he wrote in his memoir Rewrites. The credit, he felt, belonged to composer Cy Coleman, lyricist Dorothy Fields and choreographer Bob Fosse, and the latter – who had asked Simon to join the team – was particularly piqued at the critical plaudits that hurtled the playwright’s way.
The problems that Simon (still going at 91) cited remain easily identifiable. He stuffed the script with winning wisecracks but struggled to “create a real life” for irrepressible heroine Charity. The show was derived from the 1957 Fellini film Nights of Cabiria, about the romantic travails of a prostitute in Rome. In sweetening and Americanising the tale, turning “Cabiria” into “Charity Hope Valentine”, dancing partner for hire at New York’s Fandango Ballroom, the musical delivers a thumbnail sketch of a battle-hardened dreamer in a demanding, predatory (man’s) world that feels psychologically blurry.
“Your big problem is you run your heart like a hotel – guys check in and out all the time,” squawks the friendliest of her fellow hostesses, Nickie. And that’s about the upper limit of emotional insight. The banker numbers – Big Spender, If My Friends Could See Me Now and There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This in the first half alone – are what you remember, boost your engagement levels. But what are you, finally, to think, to feel?
Paul Hart’s revival at the Watermill has the immediate curiosity value of packing this uneven evocation of a bustling, exploitative demi-monde into a confined space. In terms of bravura logistics, with the cast of 13 contriving to play their instruments, dance, sing – and act naturally – you take your hat off at the start and never put it back on. The sleazy, brassy invitation of Big Spender can seldom have carried such chest-thumping heft, the hostesses so close they can shame you with a cold stare even as they ostensibly come on to you.
Factor in a tremendous leading turn from Gemma Sutton as Charity, going gooey over unsuitable, unspeakable men, oscillating between unlikely optimism and predictable dismay, and you’ve got plenty enough to enjoy here. And yet Hart attempts to go further by giving it a nominal 2018 setting.
This #Metoo era update makes a slight puzzlement of the plotting: wouldn’t, say, Charity want a selfie with the handsome film star who picks her up at a nightclub, not his memorabilia, and why would she and her neurotic third beau get trapped in an elevator without getting out their phones? The overall effect is to add to, not subtract from, the show’s existing deficits. It is what it is – and audiences should be allowed to inspect it, critique it, even charitably cherish it, warts and all.
Until Sept 15. Tickets: 01635 46044; watermill.org.uk