A Gay, Old, Time

Radio Times – Richmond Theatre, London

Music: Noel Gay

Book: Abi Grant and Alex Armitage

Director: Caroline Leslie

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

You’ve never heard of Reg Armitage from Wakefield, have you? Much less heard that he was one of Britain’s most prolific composer-lyricists in the years between the two World Wars or that Sheridan Morley described him as the nearest thing Britain had to a home-grown Irving Berlin. Changing his name to Noel Gay didn’t really help his long-term career either, despite writing Me and My Girl, in 1945 the longest running musical in London. A shift in popular musical taste and the early onset of deafness combined to limit his output, although fortunately not before he wrote the music for Radio Times.

Not, please note, ‘the musical’, as this is a compilation of songs from his back catalogue which were first assembled by TV sketch writer Abi Grant for a 1992 West End production starring the comedian Tony Slattery and Kathryn Evans and featuring deliberately corny jokes and a vintage plot.

It is appropriate that Gay’s grandson, Alex Armitage, has revised Radio Times for this production and also that it’s set in 1940, when his chirpy Cockney melodies best chimed with the times. We’re in the Criterion Theatre which being underground has been turned into a recording studio for the duration, and from which the BBC is broadcasting its popular ‘Variety Bandwagon’, closely modelled on Tommy Handley’s ITMA or Arthur Askey’s Band Waggon, for the first time to the USA.

Since this is a show from the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, the formula will be instantly recognizable – there’s no orchestra pit and the cast members all play instruments: it’s becoming increasingly a requirement that acting schools turn out attractive young performers who can act, sing and in the case of the four brilliant young women in this ensemble, play brass or woodwind and tap at the same time.

At the centre of the piece is a deft performance from Gary Wilmot, a showman to his fingertips, with a knowing line in gentle double entendres that had the Richmond audience guffawing throughout, revelling in the nostalgia and blissfully ignoring the clichés in a sentimental love triangle between Wilmot, his long-term girlfriend and an imported ‘Hollywood Movie Star’.

There’s been a gearshift in casting since the wonderful Anna-Jane Casey played Olive, the girlfriend, at the Watermill itself and Sara Crowe takes the role for the tour. Hers is not immediately a name you associate with song and dance, and whilst she may have been having an off night, seemed both tonally and in energy to be slightly below the par for this otherwise excellent cast. Vivien Carter, as the “Radio Girlfriend” who can act, sing, dance and swing a tenor sax, completely outshines her.

The star turn, though, belongs to John Conroy playing the mellifluously-named producer Heathcliffe Bultitude who morphs from strait-laced martinet reminiscent of John Barron as Reggie Perrin’s boss ‘C.J’ and barking “The BBC is clearly no place for creative people” to stand-up comedian and impressionist when he has to take over for an absent guest star. A first-rate performance, Conroy should be on his way to playing Billy Rice in ‘The Entertainer’.

The songs have the bouncy cheerfulness that raised the spirits of people huddled in air-raid shelters, and still have the power to make you smile: a couple are given surprising freshness and invention in Paul Herbert’s arrangements: an a capella ‘Run Rabbit Run’ is particularly outstanding, and you’ll go home humming ‘Who’s Been Polishing The Sun’. Take your grandma, she’ll absolutely love it.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 7 November 2012

Cherries? It's the pits ...

A Bowl of Cherries – Charing Cross Theatre, London

Book: Carolyn Pertwee

Music: David Martin

Director: Andrew C. Wadsworth

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

It would be possible to write a Ph.D thesis on the differences between a ‘revue’ and a ‘musical’, but arguably the producers of ‘A Bowl of Cherries’ wouldn’t bother to read it. They probably argue among themselves, too, since the show is billed as ‘A New Musical’ on the programmes and ‘A Musical Review’ (sic) on the posters.

This evidence of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is telling the printers is a small symptom of the disjointedness of the whole production. We are, appropriately enough for the arches under Charing Cross station, in a dusty abandoned theatre where two ghosts, she ‘Penny’ and he ‘Farthing’ (geddit) are re-living past experiences although he wants to move on and she – like the script, music and lyrics – is resolutely stuck in the past. A basket of cherries is spotlit upstage, but after the opening minute it’s hoisted aloft into the flies and never seen or referred to again.

As played by Claire Buckfield, Penny is a brightly jolly 1920s soubrette somewhat like a young Joan Collins if she could sing, Her foil in this framing of the show, Graham Macduff, is a flat-capped sleeves-rolled-up Gawd-bless-yer-Mary-Poppins kind of stagehand who sings nicely but otherwise doesn’t have much to do.

The doing, therefore, is in the hands of a six-man singing and acting troupe led by the redoubtable Gary Wilmot, who has generously given his time and his name to this piece for a nominal fee (we sat next to his lovely agent Jean Diamond) in support of his producer friend Andrew C. Wadsworth, another excellent musical theatre actor whose credentials cover a couple of dozen West End shows starting with the original ‘posh’ sibling in ‘Blood Brothers’. Both should have known better.

You can’t fault the actors or singers because they give of their best, particularly strong contributions from Julie Jupp and Eaton James, in a series of entirely forgettable ‘charm songs’ and random sketches. The sketches are universally trite and predictable, and barely funny: the audience often didn’t know whether to laugh and even on an opening night packed with well-wishers, the applause at the end of each was scant. A wife celebrating her silver wedding at a hotel is surprised when her husband asks for a separation, a young couple bicker shoutily in bed without concluding their argument, in the best-observed and most naturalistic of them a couple argues about who should make use of some frozen embryos. If there’s a linking or common theme between the scenes we couldn’t find it, unless it’s about lost children and death by motorbike.

Although the ghosts are meant to be musing on 21st century social mores and moral dilemmas, the writing is shopworn and the plotting hackneyed. In the whole two and a half pointless and overwritten hours the scenes and sketches are so mis-matched and ill-judged they wouldn’t have made it into the script of a very late episode of ‘Terry and June’. Book by Carolyn Pertwee, yes from the same theatrical dynasty as the third Dr Who and herself more famous as the ‘bossy wife’ in the Stannah Stairlifts adverts.

Two of the pieces are Christmas-themed which makes you wonder at the timing of the show in March, and the most dire is the first-act climax on Christmas Eve where the mother is a school crossing lollipop lady (in uniform, even though they don’t work in school holidays), her son is engaged to a Muslim and her daughter to a Jew, the vicar comes to tea and her husband (Wilmot) is a closet Elvis impersonator.

The music is written by David Martin whose main (some say, only) claim to fame is that he was one third of the writing team for ‘Can’t Smile Without You’ which was given a cheesy afterlife by Barry Manilow. Here apart from being the earworm you carry home in preference to anything else in the song cycle, it’s shoehorned in at torch song tempo as an embarrassing closer for ghostly Penny.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 7 March 2012