The Light Opera In the Piazza

A review of DO I HEAR A WALTZ by Richard Rogers and Stephen Sondheim, at Park Theatre

I cannot in all conscience recommend DO I HEAR A WALTZ to any but the most forensic Sondheim fans.  It does contain a version of ‘We’re Gonna Be Alright’ but it’s the heavily cut and anodyne one where the couple actually may get along together rather than the acid picture of a disintegrating relationship when David Kernan and Millicent Martin delivered the sharper lyrics in Side by Side by Sondheim.

Not restoring this song gives a clue to Charles Court Opera’s production at the Park Theatre – it’s all about the singing, the staging feels very low-budget and the comedy isn’t given the free rein it should be to make the show more palatable.  

The story is curious – several American couples holiday in Venice but the plot revolves around maturing singleton Leona.  There are some good lines about getting by on one’s own, although she could use a stronger song which reinforces that; eventually she meets a Venetian shop owner who isn’t the handsomest of men, but she falls for him.  In a pleasantly un-saccharine ending he turns out to be in some ways false, but also accusing her for the way she treats him as a trophy to be acquired like a holiday souvenir.  If the music matched the modernity of the plot it would be better, but casting mostly opera singers makes many of the numbers sound forced.

As Leona, Rebecca Seale is the least operatically-trained member of the cast and after a shaky start is smart-mouthed and engaging; as her lover Renato, Philip Lee - a crisply starched alternate Mr Snow opposite Sarah Tynan in Opera North’s gorgeous Carousel at the Barbican - is the best singer in the show but he knows it and his solos are over-posed and unbalanced. Although he sings the beautiful ballad ‘Take The Moment’ at the end of the first act perfectly and with passion, it lacks the delicate tenderness with which Mandy Patinkin infused it on his 2002 Sondheim album.

Rosie Strobel turns in a nice cameo as the voluptuous proprietress of the Pensione Fioria with Carolina Gregory as her non-English-speaking and very reluctant maid.

It's all a bit uneven but the original collaboration was something of a mess anyway: this was a Rogers and Hammerstein chamber musical where Sondheim was drafted in as lyricist after his friend and mentor Oscar Hammerstein’s death.  It borrows heavily from Noel Coward's four-years-earlier 'Sail Away', a vehicle for Elaine Stritch as the travelling singleton, and had been designed for Mary Martin to play Leona but by the time the show was ready in 1965, Martin was 51 and Rogers felt her too old for the romantic role. Franco Zeffirelli was engaged as director but Dick Rogers, who was drinking heavily at the time, fell asleep in their first meeting. Rogers later described Sondheim’s lyrics as “shit” which did little to cement their working relationship.

Bit of a wasted opportunity, they really could have done The Light In The Piazza.

The 2012 FOXIES

We’re not a big fan of awards. Especially not the sort voted for anonymously rather than juried – so often it boils down to which tyro producer has the most Facebook mates who’ll vote for his play without having seen it, or which West End shows starring TV names most fourteen-year-old girls-who-phone-in have heard of.  So in the tradition of endorsing the inaccurate prejudices of internet trolls, here are the 2012 FOXIES.

BEST ONSTAGE PLUMBING

A surprisingly tough category which ought to have been dominated by SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN where seven tons of water are sloshed and recycled nightly, although we sat close enough to scent the chlorinated detergence whose constant rinsing might account for the over-brightness of the smile La Strallen never took off her face even in the sad or serious bits.  The next contender would be MYDIDAE where Phoebe Waller-Bridge douched naked upstairs at the Soho Theatre in what every review called “a fully-plumbed bathroom”.  There were also some well-plumbed depths in the scripting and overall it felt gimmicky so this year’s winner is TWELFTH NIGHT (which we saw) and by extension the other ‘Shipwreck Plays’ in the RSC’s summer lodging at the Roundhouse. The actors are obliged to crawl under the stage and enter via a huge glazed water tank, like freshly landed fish.  Freshly landed fish is a sweeter smell than many West End offerings, so a worthy win.

BEST PLAY ABOUT SOLDIERS IN WHEELCHAIRS

Hotly contested even though there are only two nominees: OUR BOYS certainly scored on the ‘hotness’ front with a moistly pantied queue at the stage door most nights for a glimpse of Lawrence Fox or Arthur Darvill or a strangely beefed Neville Longbottom from Harry Potter, an actor who is probably destined never to be known by any other sobriquet. But the acting was as semi-stiff as some of the ‘gentlemen who moisturise’ in the audience and we preferred Sandi Toksvig’s tighter two-hander at the shiny new St James’s theatre – a Journey’s End for the Helmand generation - and so the winner is BULLY BOY.

BEST ONSTAGE COKE SNORTING

There was a time when such activity was confined to fringe venues in Brixton or Dalston, sometimes even on stage, but not only are we talking about a nose-to-nose contest between our second premier opera house and a top off-West-End railway arch, we’re also escalating this award to Best Onstage Coke Snorting By An Eponymous Heroine In A Musical With Two Christian Names In The Title.  

It’s tempting to give the award instantly to Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi if only for the pleasure of hearing Stephen Fry stumble over the pronunciation at the ceremony in the Dorchester (oh, weren’t you invited – so sorry, maybe next year) since her vocal and physical performance as Bess in Cape Town Opera’s PORGY AND BESS were equally incandescent, but ‘happy dust’ has been mentioned in previous productions and so for originality in both snorting and characterization we’re going for Laura Pitt-Pulford’s gloriously-sung creative take on Mabel Normand in MACK AND MABEL at Southwark Playhouse.  Being from Warwickshire, she’ll be cheaper to fly in than Maswanganyi.

BEST PRESS NIGHT INCENTIVE

We are not to be bought.  Certainly not by what’s usually on offer at West End press nights – a glass of tepid chardonnay and nary a twiglet in sight.  Unless you count Premier PR’s wholesale flooding of the Stalls with plastic flutes of champagne and free programmes for the opening of CHARIOTS OF FIRE, a strong runner-up for generosity if not for intimacy although we did manage to rub up against a number of Olympicans including Sally Gunnell, firm body and what felt like a rayon frock (surely not), and pre-Tom-Daley everyone’s favourite speedo wetter Mark Foster with whom we wandered out into the night for a photo-op in a Soho alley.  But for actually creating an enjoyable atmosphere in a whole theatre from cellar to rafters, and for its ingenious Hendricks Gin and Tonic Fountain in the foyer with attendants dressed as juniper-flavoured water nymphs, it’s Wilton’s Music Hall’s production of THE GREAT GATSBY that takes the crown.

BIGGEST DIVA DISAPPOINTMENT

This might have been a second ‘Singing in the Rain’ award since despire the wonderful setting and display of gameness, even the charms of LIZA MINELLI were harder to appreciate in the relentless downpour that attended her open-air concert at Hampton Court.  Every time we see Liza we think “this could be the last gig” and at one point it looked like pneumonia might carry her off actually during ‘Maybe This Time’ but she, and we, survived. So looking around for a successor to Megan Mullally for the most self-indulgent and under-rehearsed performance of the year, it was an easy win for the display of gameyness in IDINA MENZEL’s over-ambitious and under-directed whole week of concerts at the Apollo.  Lazily-scripted, slackly performed, shoeless and in a dress she had to keep tugging up over her tits this was a production of such ill-conceived inanity it could only appeal to the most hardline of her fans, some of whom actually provided 20 minutes’ of the show in a sort of karaoke session which must have been a thousand times more fun to take part in than for the rest of the audience to watch. 

BEST SURVIVOR OF CORRIE

We’re not in favour of telly casting, but conversely seem drawn to see ex-veterans of Coronation Street strutting the legitimate boards.  Sometimes it’s because we think they were ‘wasted’ in soap and could do better work, at other times it’s because they seem so closely cast to type in the television programme they’d never be capable of anything else.  So, unfortunately, seemed the case with VICKY ENTWISTLE (Janice Battersby) partnered with CRAIG GAZEY (daft Graham) in the ATG tour of FUNNY PECULIAR which would pick up our worst play of the year award if we gave one, so relentlessly sexist, homophobic and racist it shouldn’t really be performed any more. We adored SARAH LANCASHIRE in BETTY BLUE EYES and seriously admired TRACY BRABIN’s work in MEAT at Theatre 503: we think she could like Lesley Sharp make the transition from soap to Ibsen, but they are both long-gone from Corrie and so the runner up is undoubtedly the surprise and delight that is the rediscovery of WENDI PETERS (Cilla Battersby Brown) as a musical theatre talent in THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD at the Landor.  Truly a potential Mrs Lovett if anyone can ever prise the cleaver from Imelda’s cold dead hands. 

But our winner, hailed by all the print critics too, is KATHERINE KELLY (Becky Macdonald) for SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER at the National, vaulting the railway viaduct in a single bound to become a legitimate leading lady.  Let’s hope she doesn’t piss it all up the wall in MR SELFRIDGE on TV.

BIGGEST TAX DEDUCTIBLE TURKEY

The obvious choice is VIVA FOREVER, whose tuneless, thoughtless, clumsy production had a £3 million advance a month before opening and proved itself critic-proof.  It may yet break even, but it establishes ‘stadium shows’ as a different category from musical theatre and we may yet have to breed a new strain of critics to hate them enough.   So in our efforts to leave no avenue unexplored we made a pilgrimage to Leicester (wisely this time not staying overnight) for FINDING NEVERLAND.  Regardless of its total disregard for historical truth or honesty to the biography of J M Barrie, it was a lush staging with some excellent singing from Julian Ovenden, Rosalie Craig and Clare Moore. With a pirate ship AND a fully-operational vintage car, it was more Chitty and more Bang-Bang than you could shake a stick at, as, for Harvey Weinstein’s ELEVEN MILLION DOLLARS it bloody should have been. 

Like the car, it’s stalled and going nowhere, and may never-never find a London theatre to land.  But for the moment, it can console itself with its 2012 Foxy award.

Comedy-SLASH-Musical. Literally.

review of Slay It With Music
written for The Public Reviews
3 stars



Would Bette Davis be seen dead on the Isle of Dogs? Could the East India Dock Road ever be confused with Sunset Boulevard? Only in the curious conjunction of Michael Colby’s comedy thriller musical with the slightly creepy, faintly gothic converted chapel which is ‘The Space’ theatre in London’s Docklands.

The two combine in an oddly atmospheric evening of schlock and parody in which a once-great film star is reduced to making a slasher picture to make ends meet, via a remarkably high body count inside her own mansion. In a mash-up of Sunset Boulevard, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Psycho, Colby’s piece is a broad-brush portrait of two feuding actresses and the men who come, and die, between them.

As such it’s less well-scripted than, say, ‘Bette and Joan’ although there are some good laugh-out-loud one-liners,and the songs are momentarily catchy if a bit declamatory. Even the score of Sunset wouldn’t be best-served by one piano in a church hall acoustic, but a future revival might benefit from more varied orchestrations and a small band.

There’s an extractable number (I mean one which could be sung outside the context of the show) in the second act when Andrea Miller in a strong and attacking performance as the reclusive star Enid Beaucoup sings about ‘My Second Chance’ and introduces real pathos and warmth of feeling into what’s otherwise written as something of a cartoon figure.

The supporting cast inhabit their oddball characters with enthusiasm, Ellen Verenieks is effective as Enid’s TV-star sister in a well measured transition from strident to vulnerable across the evening, Helen Kelly’s powerful voice and Brooklyn accent makes the audience identify with tour guide Rosemarie and genuinely sorry when she becomes another body in a trunk.

For a low-budget production, the effects are surprisingly good, with a busy lighting plot and at least one genuine scream from an audience member at the dispatch of a victim.

The production’s staged in a diamond-shaped round, but played quite definitely toward the entrance doors which makes for the loss of some of the lyrics, particularly when the cast are dancing or killing someone, which is a lot of the time.

Ghost, with a chance ...

First thing to say about Ghost is it’s a great night out.

From its filmic start, it looks and feels crafted for a new breed of theatregoer – cleverly pitched to attract the X-Factor crowd.  The set by Jon Driscoll is three full walls of LED and the New York screetscapes zip by with energy and class.  The onstage illusions by Paul Kieve are deft and fast: he really does walk through that door, and the well-remembered set-pieces from the movie like the fight in the alley, the run through the subway train and the heavenly transfigurations are brilliantly realised although when the strobes focus on the audience the show’s dazzling in more ways than one.

Baftas all round for set, lighting and special effects, no question.  But the music and lyrics and the central performances?  Dave (Eurythmics) Stewart has rejected Betty Blue Eyes-pastiche in favour of an original pop-rock score, but the lyrics are occasionally swallowed by the reverberant sound design and the only tune you come out humming is the one you hummed on the way in, Unchained Melody.

In his wife-beater vest, balconied pectorals and rigger boots, Richard Fleeshman* looks more hustler than Wall Street banker and whilst the choreography requires him to do little more than stand around feigning anger or disbelief most of the time, his is a musically accomplished performance for a 22-year old.

We found Caissie Levy in the Demi Moore role a bit blond and bland although other critics we met in the bar admired her performance strongly.  Perhaps on the day of Rebekah Brooks’ resignation, we’d had enough corkscrew curl-tossing to last us a while.  As the psychic Oda Mae, Sharon D Clarke fully matches Whoopi’s comic turn whilst putting her own naturalistic gloss on the character and, with her voice at its career best, sings up a veritable storm. Twice.

Some of the best moments belong to Adebayo Bolaji as the subway ghost in perhaps the sharpest-recreated scene from the movie when he fights with Sam on the moving train but he also has a great solo number in the second act.

If you're looking for a modern, polished movie-related musical with more spine than Mamma Mia and maybe a touch less camp than Priscilla, this is spot on.



*Notes on the leading man:

We loved Craig the teenage Goth in Corrie.

We even pardoned his early sexualisation with kohl eyeliner and leather accessories supporting Brian Sewell’s allegation that the Street is penned by pooftahs.



We cheered him through Soapstar Superstar and went appropriately “aaah” when he turned up at the semis with his clothes in a TopShop bag.

We sneaked a look and a listen at him a couple of weeks ago when he supported his mate Julie Atherton in her one-nighter at the Apollo, and marveled at both his strong vocals and Chippendale-buffed body.

We’d heard on the Manchester grapevine (actually from a freshly shamphoo-and-setted but still insightful septuagenarian called Christine we met last week on a tram to Eccles) that the provincial tryout had been a great success, the boy done good and the special effects were outstanding.

She was right.

World Famous in Australia

Going to a one-woman show with a big West End diva. Caroline O’Connor. Who? You know, she’s British but very big in Australia, was in the Sondheim Prom and played the taxi driver in ‘On The Town’ at the Coliseum … judging by Tuesday’s audience it was the most gay, geeky or Australian show-tune fanciers who had beaten a path to Ms. O’Connor’s discounted Garrick door.

We even found one who’d paid to get in.

Which is a pity, because she’s bloody good at what she does. And for those of us who share an allergic reaction to the strain of Strallens currently running through the West End like a norovirus, here’s antidotal relief in a musical star that isn’t a shrill leggy blonde with hyperextended stage-school technique.

Neither a narrative production nor a simple cabaret act, the show incorporates anecdotes - the muezzin’s interruption of Chicago in the Lebanon being one of the best - brilliant spoof movie clips, and medleys from several productions as well as well-sung belted standards like ‘Zing Went The Strings of My Heart’, ‘And the Beat Goes On’ and a lovely affectionate version of ‘I Move On’ from the film version of Chicago.

If you compare their performances as Cassie in A Chorus Line or Chicago’s Velma Kelly, Ann Reinking may be more balletic or Ute Lemper more memorably Weimar, but no-one else better captures the characters’ raw-veined desperation - as O’Connor herself puts it - like a cat falling down the wall, clawing to hang on.

But like everything else in this show, she captures it loudly.

If there’s a fault in the otherwise ravishing orchestrations, it’s that they indulge her capacity for arm-raising crescendo once, or possibly ten times, too often. By the middle of the second half, this feels like a two-hour audition as she gives us her Piaf, Judy, Liza, Into-the-Woods Witch and Merman. Setting aside the fact that by the time Piaf was Ms. O’Connor’s age she was dead, this is possibly one diva too far.

There’s a seven-piece band which would be an entertaining act in itself, led by MD Daniel Edmonds whose Rachmaninov variations on Roxanne were the hit of the night - and the production is richly glossed by Andrew Wright’s inventive choreography, ranging from Fosse hommage to unashamed 42nd Street hoofing and delivered with great charm by the young quartet of Cole Kitchenn protégées.

If it's an audition, it may work: rumour says that there's a West End revival of Kiss of the Spider Woman on its way, and Ms O'Connor is ideal for Aurora.

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.

She IS big. It's the production that got small ...

There's something about Craig Revel Horwood I just don't like. It may be the introduction of confectionery into a surname that insults my diabetic sensibilities. Perhaps other theatre directors could consider the benefits of an injection of chocolate? Would Nicholas Malteser Hytner, or Trevor Minstrel Nunn be any more successful?

It may be the botoxed expressionless sneer he adopts for most of Strictly Come Dancing, or just an aversion to vertical hair, but I had to try hard not to let this prejudice colour my judgement of his production of Sunset Boulevard which has suddenly made the journey from Newbury to the Comedy Theatre in London's glittering West End with most of its cast intact.

What is has manifestly not done is tarted itself up for the trip to town. In fact, like a purposeful Berkshire housewife up for the Sales in sensible shoes, it looks like it's bought an Awayday ticket and is thinking of heading home on the late train.

This is a soundly competent regional production, from the Watermill - one of the most inventive and successful small producing theatres in Britain. Unlike anything you might see in Ipswich or Woking or Watford, it is not reliant on resting cast members of The Bill to attract audiences, nor is it a slave to Bill Kenwright and the Theatre of the Hasbeen.

The structure of the show is the brainchild not of C Revel H, but of the Watermill's resident artistic director John Doyle who pioneered, about ten years ago, the idea that actors in a musical could also play the instruments and dispense with a pit band thanks to the inventive musical arrangements of his creative partner Sarah Travis.

It's a formula which has worked brilliantly on productions from The Gondoliers, cunningly set in a Chicago pizza restaurant, to the outstanding Sweeney Todd which played first at the Trafalgar Studios before transferring to Broadway, giving Patti LuPone her second crack at Mrs Lovett, this time with a euphonium, and winning two Tonys.

At its best, the technique makes musicals more intimate, allowing emotional insight and subtleties of character to emerge from under the cellular blanket of lush orchestrations. I'm not sure if the formula's getting old, or there's some reason for it not to work on this particular oeuvre, but it doesn't.

Perhaps taking the immortal line about the pictures getting small, we should consider that the epic scale of Sunset demands grandiose staging and extravagant production values to match the melodramatic plot and the Churrigueresque characters? Certainly it needs more instruments to emulate that string-rich cinematic sound.

In the 60's, Stephen Sondheim had the idea of making a musical of Sunset Boulevard and collaborated briefly with lyricist Burt Shevelove to put it together, but then he met Billy Wilder at a cocktail party and floated the idea past him. "You can't write a musical about Sunset Boulevard," Wilder responded, "it has to be an opera. After all, it's about a dethroned queen." Sondheim ditched the project immediately.

Clearly, Andrew Lloyd-Webber didn't suffer the same agony of self-doubt.

I love the score. Apart from the fact that it's ironing music - a double CD to see you through the most demanding pile of shirts - and it dawned on me recently that there really only are four distinct tunes in the whole thing, I have loyally seen first Betty Buckley, then Patti, Petula and Glenn Close give their Normas. Shunned Paige, obviously. But this time, it's not working for me. Don't worry, Andrew, it happens to every composer your age at least once ...

Not that you can really fault the performances - Kathryn Evans gives her all in pursuit of the fractured heart and tortured soul of Norma Desmond and in some moments - notably her delusional return to Paramount with 'It's As If We Never Said Goodbye' she nails it absolutely.

It's Lloyd-Webber's fault that "With One Look" comes too early in the show to be effective. When she's in her light, and on her notes, this is thrilling stuff. But in this production she's too often clambering up or down a cranked metallic spiral staircase in heels and a succession of rhinestone peignoirs. Clearly she got the rump of the costume budget because everyone else seems to be in grey and white separates which might have been picked from Debenhams, since they owe little to period or place.



As Joe Gillis, relative newcomer Ben Goddard has to follow great performances like John Barrowman and Hugh Jackman, and whilst marginally less attractive, he has the ordinary guy 'aw shucks' likeability and the floppy haircut, but his range of expressions is perhaps equally floppy.

He does very well in some of the numbers, jolting the production out of its misty unreality with genuine fire in the duet "Too Much in Love to Care" played angrily against flame-haired Laura Pitt-Pulford as Betty Schaefer. In fact so convincing was the tempestuous love-hate argument between the angry young man and the redhead, it threatened to lapse in to Will and Grace: the Musical, highlighting the possibility that Kathryn Evans and Karen Walker could be cousins.

At least he affects an American accent. I have no idea why Evans elected to play Norma quite so cut-glass home counties.

Dave Willetts adds to the grand guignol mood of the drama with a dark characterisation for the servant/husband Max, and effortlessly excellent singing you'd expect from a veteran Jean Valjean and Phantom. The ensemble keep up their instrumental playing relentlessly, and play the entire score from memory, but it does cause some detraction from the diction and the impact of some of the punchier numbers like the rousing 'This Time Next Year' is lost.

I was expecting more from the choreography since that's Revel-Horwood's forte, allegedly. Apart from some nifty traffic-direction with the performers and their instruments moving rapidly without collision, there's little actual dancing - except when Joe and Norma perform the tango in a version so obviously more indebted to Strictly Come Dancing than thirties Hollywood, that you could feel the entire audience clenching to avoid shouting "bring back John Sergeant!"




Trivia:

Kathryn Evans is Mrs Peter Purves (of Blue Peter fame). They met in pantomime in 1978 when she was Dandini and he was Baron Hardup.