French Leave ... preferably in the interval

Sacre Bleu, Zut Alors, Quelle Horreur, and as for the choreography: Fosse septique … pick your own Francophone diatribes, this is vachement awful.

It’s a shame, because the hand on the Kneehigh Theatre tiller is Emma Rice who helmed their extraordinarily inventive Brief Encounter but to continue the boating metaphors it’s no coincidence that Cherbourg was the port from which the Titanic steered out into the Atlantic, you can’t wait for this leviathan to hit its own iceberg.

Reworked from the Jacques Demy movie which made Catherine Deneuve a star, it's a tenderly simple story of very young lovers parted by circumstance – he’s sent to fight in Algeria whilst she covers her pregnancy marrying a rich bore.  He returns, she’s gone, he marries the maid.  The central character of the girl’s mother is played here by the much undervalued Joanna Riding as a haughty harridan in a ginger Fanny Cradock wig and the lovers limply by recent Guildford graduate Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand for some unfathomable reason imported from the US to play Guy, despite the fact the West End is crawling with unemployed lightweight younger leading men: shout across the street from the Gielgud to The Yard bar and you’d find a dozen his equal.

‘Internationally renowned’ (although not so much in this country) cabaret artiste Meow Meow – actually a harmless Australian soubrette called Melissa Madden Gray who assumes her fantasy alter ego rather like Humphries does Edna - is contractually obliged to front the soiree in a split skirt, fishnets and black beehive.  She also has to hustle the reluctant audience participation so morphs Irma La Douce with Gladys from Hi-de-Hi in a performance which is more cliché than Clichy.  Mind you, in the echoing grove of yesterday’s second press night with three-quarters of the seats unsold, not even Ken Dodd could have warmed us up.  Her ‘straight’ entr’acte solo ‘Sans Toi‘ is delivered sans taste and with so much eye rolling, r’s trilling and lardoned pathos that the producers of ‘Allo ‘Allo would have cut it from embarrassment.

Veteran composer Michel Legrand reworked his orchestrations for the production – but using the sort of random, stunted, cul-de-sac riffs which make you realise some jazz is basically musical masturbation: enjoyable for the participants but ultimately not really a spectator sport.  And it’s through-sung which means banalities to music, and no interruption for some sharp dialogue or even a joke.  There’s only one recognizable theme tune (appropriately the made-for-lift-muzak If It Takes Forever I  Will Wait For You) which repeats on such an interminable loop the audience feels it’s being battered to death with an especially stale baguette.

There’s a highly mechanized set from Lez Brotherston with tricksy use of model buildings, artful neon and an unexpected skate ramp, colourful costumes, and a seductive lighting scheme by Malcolm Rippeth, but it’s all so much empty effort when the performance doesn’t engage with the audience.

London weather’s so unpredictable but I expect folding Umbrellas before Easter.

Nuns On The Run

In a week in which seventeen assorted British piss artists on a stag weekend were arraigned in Greece for impersonating nuns - albeit not convincingly enough for the prosecution to produce a single complainant witness at their trial - it seems appropriate to reflect on the position of the Sisterhood in popular entertainment, and why nuns are perceived as funny and cute.



Anyone who's seen or read The Magdalene Sisters - or, indeed, rewound and replayed the segment where Geraldine McEwan thrashes the bejaysus out of Dorothy Duffy with a rubber hose and a glint that should really have disqualified her from ever again playing sweet old ladies like Miss Marple - would consider institutionalised sadism, lesbianism, mental cruelty and downright cant to be core values in convents, but stage musicals resist the repressive and celebrate nuns as cuddly.

Fair enough, but I wouldn't want to bring one home.

Clearly this bunch trained at the Eternal Sunshine Seminary of St. Connie of All The Fishers since they have 'Sound of Music' written through them like rock - there's the dour one, the sour one, the chubby one, the feisty novice and the septuagenarian rapper. Well maybe Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't envision the rapper but in this production it's veteran Julia Sutton (whose age it would be indecent to guess but I bet it starts with an 8 before the show's run is finished) who steals every scene in which she appears.

Sister Act has a slow start as it struggles with the necessary plotline in which lounge singer Deloris van Cartier, girlfriend of a small-time hoodlum, witnesses a gangland murder and is forced to hide out in a convent until the perps can be brought to trial. That this segment is played out to a crude pop musical score which belongs more to X-Factor than Broadway is a frailty in the show that needs to be fixed. Patina Miller, although playing a substandard lounge singer, doesn't make you warm to her as automatically as Whoopi (National Treasure) Goldberg, and only gets the audience onside later in the show.



Patina, incidentally, is not the 'Broadway star' the production hype might have you believe. I don't think she's headlined any show indoors in New York although she did appear in 'Hair' in Central Park - and Sister Act itself has never been to Broadway, coming to the Palladium from, er, Pasadena via eight weeks in Atlanta and a two-year rewrite gap. Don't get me wrong, she's good, but she's also slightly misrepresented. Possibly to avoid too much Googling, she's dropped her middle name - search 'Patina Renea Miller' for her early career.

Once Deloris is pitched into the convent, enter Mother Superior Sheila Hancock and her penguin chorale and suddenly we have a musical. In her first speeches, the standard of acting is raised a thousandfold, the comedy is subtler, and she and Ms Miller begin the sparring double act around which the show then revolves. I have to confess I know Sheila, slightly: we shared a monumentally weird holiday in Budapest a couple of years ago and the episode in which we were involuntarily herded in to a 'couples' massage in the Gellert Baths would make a musical comedy number in its own right as we tried to explain our way out, in clutched towels and pidgin Hungarian.

Hancock's only solo - a 'tale as old as time' Beauty-and-the-Beast-retread entitled 'Here Within These Walls' is beautifully if gently delivered: she shares a graceful musical quality with Sian Phillips, belying her 76 years, although the show has been 'adjusted' since Atlanta to reduce the singing load for Mother Superior. Where she excels is in a redefined characterisation which resists comparison with Maggie Smith in the movie, and which is more wryly and directly funny. Although why she didn't attempt an American accent escapes me.

The score is at its best when the nuns are given full throttle: two stand-out numbers (all originals and different from the movie because of copyright issues) are 'Raise Your Voice' in which Deloris instructs the choir in singing and which ascends in power through more key changes than the average Eurovision vehicle, and 'Take Me To Heaven' first sung (badly) by Deloris and her backing singers then turned into a holy roller by the nuns. I also enjoyed the hoodlums' spoof Barry White crooner 'When I Find My Baby' (I'm gonna kill her) and in the Sisters' patter song 'How I Got The Call' lyricist Glenn Slater gives free rein to internal rhyme which looks hugely jolly but is unfortunately macerated by either the diction or the sound desk, couldn't tell which.

Diminutive Julia Sutton threatens to upstage even Hancock as the gravel-voiced hard-drinking Mary Lazarus, and Claire Greenway outweighs Kathy Najimy as the sunny funny nunny Mary Patrick. The minor characters are all fair to good, although I can't quite see why Ian Lavender merits an over-the-title billing for his small contribution as Monsignor Howard.

It's the female ensemble that deserves the kudos, though, for its stamina in switching scene by scene from playing the nuns to the whole panoply of other characters who populate the story, from biker gangs to disco queens. It's a bit like the hardworking crew of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, but with better songs and - you won't believe this - more glittery costumes.

The set (by ex-Czech Klara Zieglerova) works very hard too: double revolve, lots of rising and falling elements, and it makes the scene transitions mercifully slick ... ingeniously so in the 'chase' when the hoodlums get in to the convent to find Deloris, there's a series of doors and arches moving on the revolve whilst the entire cast breaks in to a run through them which must have taken designer and choreographer ages to work out, but v. effective.

Jesus's nailed crossed feet appear from above periodically which is as camp as the giant in Into the Woods ... but even the luminous stained glass windows pale into insignificance against the nun's costumes which are so progressively flashy - by the finale they're so reflective you almost can't look - that designer Lez Brotherston must have finished them in a welder's mask.

The West End is well-supplied with big musicals, tickets are £60something, and with 20,000 a week to sell the Palladium's hard to fill. But for naturally uplifting musical comedy which is reliant on talent rather than the weight of costumes and effects in Priscilla - currently playing to every gay man and his mother in the Western World - I'd calculate Sister Act is a hit.

Get thee to a nunnery. To a nunnery, go.

Especially if you can get discounted tickets.