Too few laughs mean there’s no Silvio lining
This is a kerplunking musical satire about the former Italian prime minister who was a cruise-ferry crooner before he became a prime minister. He still, arguably, out-sleazes the equally orange-tanned Trump.
Written by Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan, the show is in the sung-through style of Evita. The idea is that Silvio sees himself as both Jesus and the emperor Tiberius, so it is staged on a set of white marble steps – a constant trip hazard for the cast of ten.
It’s set in 2012, the final day of Berlusconi’s trial for tax fraud. The Italian stallion is played by Sebastien Torkia (not much of a lookalike, but he’s good at preening) who, in the self-penned opera of his life, whisks us through his career as crooner, property magnate, media mogul, owner of AC Milan and finally PM.
James Grieve’s production is crammed with Eurotrash-style songs and allusions to the ‘bunga bunga’ sex parties, Berlusconi’s unsavoury bromance with a topless
Putin (a disappointing duet) and so on. The message is ‘careful who you vote for’, to underline the show’s banal antipopulist credentials.
Women haunt the evening, as they should. The scarier ones include his ex-wife, the state prosecutor and his bonkers mama (Susan Fay), whose heavenly appearances are rare moments of amusing idiocy.
But it all lacks narrative drive and there’s zero jeopardy as we know our anti-hero dodged the bullet at his trial. Less forgivably, it is short on laughs and an hour too long.
What could be more English than Winnie The Pooh, A. A. Milne’s classic featuring the bear of little brain? Yet in Jonathan Rockefeller’s staging, culled from the Disney films, Pooh and friends have cheesy American accents.
The puppet-handlers manipulate large soft animals on a lush set with a bridge, a river and a tree in the Hundred Acre Wood. Piglet gets swept up by a kite and Pooh, on the hunt for a ‘smackerel’ of ‘hunny’,
gets stuck in the tree. Christopher Robin has to go off to school but Rabbit, Owl and Eeyore are present and correct, Tigger being the most lively, of course. But I have to say the songs by the Sherman Brothers (apart from The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers) don’t repeat the magic they gave to Mary Poppins.
Carrots jump out of the ground and there’s a snowstorm kids will love. But there’s not quite enough involvement here for the pre-schoolage children it’s aimed at.
This has a certain sweetness to it overall, but I would still recommend the audiobook brilliantly read by Alan Bennett.
It’s as it should be – sublime.