The ballad of Bonnie and Clyde revisited in a fresh key
THEATRE
Bonnie and Clyde King’s Theatre, Glasgow JJJJ
Who Pays the Piper? Oran Mor, Glasgow JJJJ
Outsiders and outlaws: they’re glamorous, thrilling and the stuff of legend – yet still, most of us would never choose to be them. The UK touring version of the Bonnie & Clyde musical – set to reach Edinburgh in July – offers an extraordinarily vivid take on the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, two small-town kids from Texas who, in the early 1930s, went on a robbing and killing spree across the southern United States, until a posse gunned them down in 1934. ndit’s
a fiercely dramatic tale of the American Dream gone wrong which the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway transformed into a global icon of doomed rebellion. What the musical version can do in ways the film cannot is dive into the burning emotional depths of frustration, anger, ambition and desire that drive Bonnie and Clyde, and give them full expression, via Frank Wildhorn’s music and Don Black’s lyrics, using big numbers to evoke the communities against which they rebelled. In director-choreographer Nick Winston’s powerful production, Katie Tonkinson and Alex James-hatton deliver moving, thought-provoking performances in the lead roles, charting how the booming Hollywood film industry encouraged small-town Americans to dream of other worlds, while the crushing Depression often left young men with little alternative but to take to crime. The couple’s instant recognition of each other as fellow outlaws, and the depth of their connection, is touchingly conveyed in songs like Bonnie’s How ‘Bout A Dance, and Clyde’s tender ballad Bonnie; their connection to the wider world is brilliantly channelled through Clyde’s sister-in-law Blanche, played and sung with terrific flair by Catherine Tyldesley – and Sam Ferriday as his brother Buck, always torn between the law-abiding life Blanche yearns for, and the thrill of the road.
And with spectacular numbers like God’s Arms Are Always Open bringing the 17-strong cast together to evoke the intensity of Christian fundamentalist culture, this fine show has plenty to tell us about the world that made Bonnie & Clyde. It also offers a gently operatic vision of the couple themselves, as hardfaced killers who may, in the end, have been driven as much by love, yearning and youthful recklessness, as by fear, hatred and greed.
The young heroine of Jen Mcgregor’s powerful A Play, A Pie and A Pint show Who Pays The Piper is also something of an outsider; although in Sarah’s case she is simply enduring the grinding 21st-century exhaustion of a young aspiring singer from a working-class background trying to make a career in opera. She works as a delivery rider to eke out her modest income from singing lessons, and in her late twenties is running out of energy and hope. When she meets a rich lady student in her fifties, who can afford to hire halls and give concerts as her latest hobby, frustrations come to a head.
In Tom Cooper’s production, Helen Logan makes a heroic job of the role of wealthy Marie, not a great singer, but still – as she poignantly tackles Purcell’s When I Am Laid In Earth – not the talentless monster it would have been easy to make her. It’s a measure of the strength of Christina Gordon’s quietly brilliant performance as Sarah, though, that it always remains the heart-wrenching emotional centre of the show; a story of a generation heartbroken by empty promises of equality and opportunity, and now barely able to imagine any viable economic future, far less the one of which they dreamed.
Bonnie & Clyde at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 2-6 July. Who Pays The Piper, run over. Joyce Mcmillan