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.

Stagey Play For Stagey People

production photo by Johan Persson

How splendidly the Donmar adapts to every new production: from the blinding pennants of the Spelling Bee school gym to the stark guns-and-gantries of the all-female Julius Caesar and now an authentically lamp-black pickled Victorian music hall with soaring columns, creaking boards and a whiff of oranges and cheap scent in the pit.

Rose Trelawny is the darling of the ‘Wells’ theatre troupe but leaves to marry a young posh bloke.  Although she finds his family stifling and eventually bolts, on her return she’s lost her ability to act. The situation is saved by a young writer in the company who’s invented a new and more naturalistic style of play which suits Rose’s new manners.

It's a vehicle for author Arthur Wing Pinero's campaign to change the nature of theatre, seeking to reflect real people in credible situations, here by ridiculing the bombastic and overdone performances of the time. Ironic, really, when you think how his farces like Dandy Dick and The Magistrate still depend on strident acting.

It’s a doubly Londony show, too: set in 1865 when Sadler’s Wells - long before it became the terpsichorean temple of the Waitrose-going classes - was the satellite TV channel of its day churning out lurid melodramas for a lowbrow audience, and the director is Islington-reared, Central St Martin’s-trained film maker Joe Wright who turned Keira Knightley into Anna Karenina.

In the same way we couldn’t wait for that train to arrive, and although both the ideas and the plot are interesting and amusing, Trelawny is a very slow burner and takes too long to develop. Patrick Marber’s script additions blend seamlessly with Pinero’s original and the cast double both the acting troupe and the frightful society family, none better than Ron Cook as the stern Vice Chancellor and a theatrical landlady who’s a close cousin of Old Mother Riley.

Playing Rose, Amy Morgan trills prettily and simpers in a white frock as readily as Amanda Seyfried in Les Miserables but the best of the casting is in the smaller roles: the wonderful Maggie Steed as a fading actress and disabled dowager, Daniel Mays as a posturing ham actor of the oldest possible school.  Finest of all is Daniel Kaluuya voicing Pinero’s own opinions on theatre and the development of the new realism as the hesitant playwright Tom Wrench: excellent characterization and subtlety in a play where most others are deliberately cartoon figures.

This review written for Londonist.com and published 28 February 2013

THE VORTEX by Noel Coward
Rose Theatre, Kingston
* * * * 



Coward's scraped-savings visit to New York in 1921 taught him two things which would serve him for a lifetime: that Broadway plays were performed at a much snappier pace than English comedies, and that if you were young and pretty and could play the piano, someone rich would invite you to a party. He was entertained frequently by the eccentric and flamboyant American actress Laurette Taylor and her diffident writer husband J. Hartley Manners and repaid them by picturing their characters in two early plays. In Hay Fever, it's affectionate and light-hearted, in The Vortex, it's cruel, and Stephen Unwin's vibrant but contradictory revival splendidly highlights the spite. 

read the rest of the review on www.onestoparts.com here

No More, Mr Nice Guy ...

SOME GIRLS at Theatro Technis
* *

Some Girl(s) - yes, that's how it's titled - is not Neil LaBute's best work. Less funny than Fat Pig, less edgy than In The Company of Men, it's best known as a production vehicle for ex-sitcom stars to entertain their TV audiences in the comfort of a theatre. In London David (Friends) Schwimmer and on Broadway Eric (Will & Grace) McCormack played the central character referred to as 'Man', a wired, awkward, nervously energetic writer on the verge of commitment to marriage who - in four separate-but-near-identical hotel rooms across the States - meets a series of ex-girlfriends.

Ostensibly, he's out to make peace with them and settle some old emotional debts - they each seem to have a valid reason to be angry with him - but it's equally clear he, and they, have 'issues' to work out. Unfortunately in Tower Theatre's amateur production, shorn of any 'him off the telly' celebrity interest in a principal actor, it just doesn't come off the page and it's hard to engage with either the writer on the stage, or the writer of the play.

'Man' - although I'm fairly sure it was 'Guy' on Broadway - is a neurotic who's had one espresso too many, popping on the balls of his feet, twisting his hands in mid-air to make a point, forever touching his face or his forehead or his hair, verbally and physically contorting to rationalise his past transgressions and present himself as a 'nice guy'. Laurence Ward captures this accurately, but it still makes you want to punch him.

LaBute has his hero engage the women's emotions or sexuality, and occasionally make genuinely reparative offers of reconciliation for his past behaviour, but the character fails as a credible Everyman because he's so monothematically an 'average white guy' locked in a cage of whiny self-justification.

Tower Theatre is an ambitious amateur company, producing twenty or more shows in a year, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the casting or the directing; everyone knows their lines, it has good pace, the women are nicely differentiated, the set's substantial enough and the stage management work hard to make each successive hotel room distinct from the others, but on this play their efforts are largely wasted.

This review written for www.remotegoat.co.uk and published on 13 February 2013

A Shaw Thing

"Shaw shorts for those without the buttocks for Major Barbara"

“Oh, that Bernadette Shaw!” shrieks Simon Russell-Beale’s drag queen character in Privates on Parade, “What a chatterbox! Nags away from arsehole to breakfast-time but never sees what's staring her in the face.”

If you’re also in the camp that thinks George Bernard Shaw was endlessly verbose, you’re in for a treat at Wilmington Theatre’s neatly boxed production of three short, sharp and funny playlets at the Old Red Lion.

It’s as though the old boy gave up worthy polemical drama and started to write for ‘Smack the Pony’ as these extended sketches tackle marital fidelity, uppity women, wife swapping and the contrasting moralities of London and ‘the country’ from a perspective you simply wouldn’t expect of a dramatist born in the 1850’s.

In ‘Village Wooing’ a shop assistant wins a competition and takes a world cruise on which she meets a travel writer – but he’s so focused on his own writing that he’s not observant enough to experience anything ‘in the moment’.  Shaw could as easily be spoofing the Facebook and Twitter era where tourists frame the world through the postings they put online …

In ‘Overruled’ itself, two adulterous couples bicker with each other and eventually agree how to swap partners: it’s rammed with epigrammatic banter and you’ll wonder whether Noel Coward read it before writing Private Lives, the speech rhythms are so similar.

Polina Kalinina’s directing is pacy and admirably well-focused, the company of six actors are universally fine: Lucy Hough especially so as the shop assistant and architect of her own future in ‘Village Wooing’ and Leo Wyndham delivering two excellently differentiated variations on foot-shuffling awkwardness as callow young romantics.

Emma Bailey‘s set is elegant and clean, washing the backgrounds in cool blue-grey and cream, with very good furniture and props, and the ladies’ costumes are beautiful – perhaps a touch too revealing for an Edwardian cruise ship although the gents in the audience didn't seem to mind and with the temperature in the auditorium, I'd gladly have stripped down to my pants.


originally written for Londonist, published 4 January 2013

Tennant's Extra

OUR BOYS at the Duchess Theatre




Television can make gods of competent actors. The womanly throng crowding the stage door of Our Boys is hungry for Laurence Fox (Lewis), Arthur Darvill (Dr Who) and Matthew Lewis (a nicely matured Neville Longbottom from Harry Potter). But it’s to their credit that the other three actors in this six-man piece are equally good.

This may be the first time in history a play has been inspired by a pain in the arse: writer, and sometime Soldier, Soldier actor Jonathan Guy Lewis had a spell in hospital when an officer cadet on an army University scholarship, suffering from pilonidal cyst, a painful anal abscess which allowed him to observe – as much as you can when face down on your bed – the antics and personalities of the other ward residents, mostly Northern Ireland veterans.

It’s all cock in this play: Fox is the sexually-successful ‘Battersea Boner’, a ringleader whose natural ability to inspire confidence challenges that of the trainee officer also billeted on the ward, Lewis is a knob-end whose knob end has been bruisingly circumcised, and Darvill a twitchy and dangerously self-serving dick whose actions eventually provide the pivot on which the play turns from knockabout banter to something more involved and intriguing.

This is the second best play with soldiers in wheelchairs we’ve seen in a week. Sandi Toksvig’s intense and impeccable Bully Boy at the newly opened St James Theatre takes the prize – it’s a Journey’s End for the Helmand generation – but Our Boys is more openly entertaining and comic despite its now-dated racism, sexism and fart-jokes and if it takes a while to soften you up, the dramatic climax is all the more electric for that.  The scene where the sextet plays Russian roulette with beer cans in homage to The Deer Hunter is worth the ticket price on its own.

Darvill’s appearance brought the Dr Who brigade out in force. We sat in the same row as Mrs Laurence Fox, Billie Piper, and directly in front of David Tennant. Matt Smith was just across the aisle. Interestingly, those two deliberately sidestepped each other after the performance, although whether out of politeness or to avoid a split in the space-time continuum when two Doctors collide, we couldn’t say.

We know fans hang on their idols’ every word, so are pleased to report that Tennant’s immediate after-curtain reaction was “I need a wee”, although when informed by his friends they were going straight to the after-show party, he conceded “Oh, okay then, I’ll wee there”.

Hey-ho the glamorous life of your dutiful reporter among television Royalty in London’s glittering West End.

written for Londonist and published on 5 October 2012

A Crack Production

Cape Town Opera's PORGY AND BESS at the Coliseum





We’re not ones to tut-tut about moral standards in the London theatre but this is the second show in two nights where the eponymous heroine does cocaine onstage. And you don’t expect that from the Gershwins.

In Thom Southerland’s clever and noir-ish Mack and Mabel at Southwark Playhouse, the darker side of Mabel Normand’s character is explored and like many early Hollywood stars she relied on such stimulants to get her through a punishing schedule. When in Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi‘s incandescent physical and vocal performance in Cape Town Opera’s grandiose production, Bess asks Sportin’ Life for a wrap of "happy dust" we were struck by the similarities. Both have made unsuitable choices in life, and realization of their mistakes comes too late to save either of them.

Last seen in London as a self-assured but awkward Carmen Jones at the Festival Hall in 2007, Maswanganyi is an unconventionally great Bess. Beautiful as a pre-tantrum Naomi Campbell, angular, alert and blatantly provocative, it’s perhaps hard to understand why she’s drawn to either the lumpen and bullying Crown, great resonant strength from Ntobeqo Rwanka, or why she rejects him in favour of the sexually innocent cripple Porgy, here given equal measures of resilience and pathos in Xolela Sixaba's rich and silken bass-baritone.  Their duet "Bess You Is My Woman Now" is deeply affecting. Although at 2 hours 45 there are lulls in the action, we found a vast amount to enjoy in Christine Crouse’s epic, stage-filling production but wondered how much was added by the transposition from the American depression so specifically to 1970s Soweto. There are some well-exploited opportunities to Africanise the dance rhythms and chorus intonations, and all the invocations of Jesus make for an authentic revival meeting sound but it also makes a nonsense of the plot in the second half where a ship and several fishermen are lost at sea, since Johannesburg is 500km inland.

There are some great cameos, we really warmed to the “honey man” voice of Andile Tshoni as Peter and the fierce pride and stunning rapping of Miranda Tini as statuesque shopkeeper Maria, the scene where she upbraids Victor Ryan Robinson’s oily and sinuous sleazeball Sportin’ Life is a treat.


written for Londonist and published on 13 July 2012

Wet, Wet, Wet

Twelfth Night, at the Roundhouse




We did Shakespeare at school in a heavily glazed South-facing classroom with an almost equally glazed expression so can’t quite recall ‘The Shipwreck Plays’ as being one of the examination-board approved sub-classifications alongside The Histories, The Tragedies, The Problem Plays and so on. But someone among the great and the good at the Royal Shakespeare Company clearly thinks there’s sufficient linkage between The Comedy of Errors (early, farcical nonsense) The Tempest (late, magical, operatic) and Twelfth Night (middle, Christmassy, lightweight) that it’s worth floating the three of them over a huge water tank first at Stratford and now hauled to the Roundhouse.

The first thing that hits you is Jon Bausor’s 270-degree sky-high set, working better at the Roundhouse where it integrates well with the gantried-and-galleried interior of the former railway shed. There’s an operational lift, revolving door, steeply angled bedroom and reception of a raffish hotel all mounted over a glass-sided water tank through which actors explode in gasping wet entrances like freshly landed fish. Despite the fact it contains almost every film noir scenic cliché from the rattling cage lift to the slowly revolving fan, it’s immediately exciting and works brilliantly.

The first act is a touch underlit and makes it harder to engage with the romantic plot – separated-by-shipwreck twins Sebastian and Viola each love a count or countess, Viola cross-dressing as a manservant in order to be closer to the object of her affection ...  oh what the hell, you’ll pick it up – but it almost doesn’t matter because the lovers are eclipsed by the comic characters, permanently plastered Sir Toby Belch (gloriously coarse Nicholas Day) and top flight Bruce Mackinnon as a tow-haired and tousled Sir Andrew Aguecheek part swaggering Bullingdon toff and part sniggering schoolboy clutching the edge of his blazer from timidity. Their baiting of the po-faced and uptight steward Malvolio is the heart and driving force of this production.

Rivalling Mackinnon for the best-acting chops is Jonathan Slinger as an outstanding Malvolio both in his prim household managerial mode and when discomfited by the teasing, and parading in the (won’t spoil the surprise) outfit they make him wear. It’s low comedy and could be crude were it not for the impressive quality of the acting: the scene where Kevin McGonagle as Feste dresses up as a monk to torment Slinger by ‘inquisition’ is pure Peter Sellers.

Just don’t take your gran if she’s shocked by fetish gear.

Written for Londonist and published on 15 June 2012

The Great American Musical

The scale of the Coming-To-America migration musical Ragtime is epic, so grandiose, so richly populated with cast that when it opened in 1998, the production budget was $11 million and two adjacent Broadway theatres were combined into one just to contain it.

The inventive team at Regent’s Park never fights shy of a challenge: their magical twig-and-twine four-tier set for Into the Woods and the massive glamorously-costumed ensemble tap dancing its way across the frequently rain-slicked stage in Crazy For You pay tribute to their resourcefulness in staging a "big" musical.

They’re also banking on its commercial success – unusually this year the season isn’t segmented into four, and just two productions (the other is A Midsummer Night’s Dream) run right across the programme from May to September. That’s longer than Ragtime managed in its critically-acclaimed New York revival in 2009.

Ragtime tells the overlapping stories of an aspirational family in New Rochelle, NY and the interlacing of their community with arrivals of Latvian Jews and African Americans: it’s usually performed in the period costume of 1906 on a stage teeming with characters in suffragette hats or britches like a boatload of extras from Titanic. Just as well the potato famine was half a century earlier or we’d have had the Irish on board too, and had to mix fiddley gigs in with the cakewalks, gospel and piano rags which punctuate Stephen Flaherty’s excitingly brassy and anthemic score.

In "Woods", director Timothy Sheader re-imagined the story through the eyes of a runaway child, and added a layer of perspective to a well-known show.  Here he has chosen a modern post-Obama scrapheap from which the actors only gradually adopt their period personas and maybe you’ll feel it makes the already complex story a fraction less accessible: an opacity further complicated by some gender-blind and racially-blind casting which we found surreal in a show largely about the contemporary politics of gender and race.

Perhaps he should have heeded the advice of his own leading lady in Ragtime Rosalie Craig, magnificent throughout and electric in her 11 o’clock number "You Can Never Go Back to Before", since Sheader's repeated theatrical device is a ‘marmite’ which threatens to divide audiences. If it irks you, you really need to abandon your irritation early to thoroughly enjoy the production. But there is an enormous amount to enjoy: the cast are universally fine, you cannot fail to be uplifted by the music, and by their energy and commitment in Javier de Frutos’ choreography which stays truer to the original Vaudeville concept.

And that torn poster of Barack Obama overlooking the whole proceedings? If it bothers you, just thank your lucky stars it isn’t George Bush.



Written for Londonist and published on 30 May 2011

SW19 Pacific

If you thought £92.50 including booking fee was going it a bit for an average Stalls seat at the Barbican’s Lincoln Center production of South Pacific you’ll be delighted to know that substantially the same show, with the same leads, is currently available for less than half that and your Zone 3 Oyster.

When successful London musicals set off ‘on tour’ it’s generally to places like Manchester or Newcastle where despite lower seat prices the train fare would cripple any opportunity to see them on an awayday, but the bonus ball of producers ATG is that they also own theatres in Wimbledon and Richmond to which they bring their number one tours (first rate King’s Speech, Madness of George III both recently at Richmond, top price £35). South Pacific docks at Wimbledon for the rest of the month, tickets £15-45.

It’s a richer and darker South Pacific than you’ll have seen at your mum’s amateur operatic society – Bartlett Sher's production isn’t shy of highlighting the casual racism and sex tourism of American military personnel in wartime postings. Even though a bit fortyish for a newly-recruited Navy nurse, Samantha Womack handles well the anguished reaction of the dumb blonde from Arkansas (racially segregated until 1957) to a lover with two Polynesian children, and the direction, underscore and lighting of the pimping of Bloody Mary’s daughter Liat to Lt Joe Cable is carefully studied too.

As well as the Barbican leads Womack, Alex Ferns and a fetching upcoming Australian Daniel Koek (you’d change that, wouldn’t you?) as Joe Cable there are two outstanding performances – one from Hawaiian actress Loretta Ables Sayre who I saw as Bloody Mary in the original Lincoln Center production and gives a sensational rendition of the complex character, with stunning singing particularly in ‘Happy Talk’ which suddenly doesn’t seem a one-dimensional number any more.

The second is truly a highlight of the show since the new casting of veteran Jean Valjean/Phantom Matthew Cammelle is perfection. He has the dashing forties movie-star look for Emile De Becque, and a glorious combination of unclouded operatic baritone with excellent musical theatre diction. South Pacific is an odd show in that it gives away its money shot number ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ barely ten minutes after the overture, but the second act climax of Cammelle’s powerful and emotionally resonant ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ brought the house down with shouts of ‘bravo’.

If that isn't incentive enough to pop down to Wimbledon, here's a video of Joe Cable/Daniel Koek with his shirt - and everything else - off, for a charity photoshoot.


This review written for www.londonist.com

Not Defying Gravity

Review of The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Vaudeville Theatre



Yeah, yeah, we get it: you’re not brothers, you don’t fly and no-one’s from Russia.  And you juggle, how hilarious is that?

The ‘FKB’ are a four-man troupe led - since 1975 - by ponytailed Paul Magid who has possibly the second least attractive London stage persona after ‘Sir’ Bruce Forsyth.  Certainly he found it hard to lash the sparse Thursday night audience into anything approaching enthusiasm.

He’s also the one who seemed to drop most of the balls and clubs, and we’re not counting those ho-ho-ho ‘accidentally on purpose’ moments which were too numerous to be convincing: when you drop illuminated balls on a darkened stage and they roll into the wings, no-one thinks that’s a joke.

No one thought much else in the act was a joke either – there’s a running (make that limping) gag about gathering nine ‘objects of terror’ like a hatchet, an egg and a shaken bottle of champagne which will be juggled in the finale, but by the time we got to seven someone near us suggested the eighth object of terror should be the script.

Those sight gags about blindness, the casual racism about dog-eating Koreans, the unfunny puns and the whole lame-ass pretence of being corn-pone Americans failing to understand the Brits just don’t work.  And nobody finds anything about the House of Lords amusing, certainly not just mentioning it and hoping for a laugh.

There’s music, but it’s random and often poor – Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance doesn’t by itself make plastic Indian Clubs exciting, and the ‘jazz juggling’ required such long and tedious explanation of how twirling objects is like the rhythm of a jazz quartet that most of the audience lost the will to riff.

The actual juggling routines are well-choreographed and among the younger performers, Stephen Bent is very competent and has nice hair, but it’s too like an audition for Britain’s Got Talent and you long for someone to buzzer them off and make way for a dog act.


This review written for Londonist.

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.

Goodnight, Vienna

There is an array of all-American talent squished onto the Menier Chocolate Factory stage that is both formidable and incomprehensible. From Mandy Patinkin, arguably the finest Sondheim interpreter of his generation, to Broadway back-catalogistas like Judy Kaye and John McMartin, this is the stuff of dreams for many producers.

I won’t hazard a guess at the total number of awards between them, but it must be over fifty. Some dullard from Leeds will undoubtedly tally up the Tonys, Drama Desks, Oscars, Oliviers and BAFTAS listed in the programme and write in to correct me.

Such a pity, then, that they have been assembled, in the no less luminous hands of Evita-to-Phantom director Hal Prince and prima choreographa assoluta Susan Stroman in a complete barrowload of tripe.

It is impossible to fathom what passed through whose mind when it was first suggested that the Shah of Persia’s visit to Vienna in 1873 would make a viable subject for a musical, that modern lyrics could be welded to genuine Strauss tunes, or that it was a good idea to convince Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin to shave his head and play a fey Muslim eunuch in a performance exactly midway between Alec Guinness’s equally racially unrealistic Dr Godbole in A Passage to India, and Kevin Chamberlin’s Uncle Fester in Addams Family the Musical.




It’s called ‘Paradise Found’ but the only reference to Milton I can find is that you’d have to be blind to see the good in it.

Was Max Biyalistock originally Viennese?

Whilst Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar was a fascinating and cultured monarch – a painter, a poet and photographer who held sovereign power for almost 50 years, outstripped only by Queen Victoria whose reign ran parallel to his own. He was the first ruler to visit Europe and the first to publish his diaries – but in the Richard Nelson script, he’s a randy one-dimensional buffoon played half a degree above Baron Hardup and in a series of cheap lurex kaftans by five times Tony nominee John McMartin who looks understandably bewildered throughout.



The gist of the plot is that the Shah becomes infatuated by the Empress of Austria, and demands his servants procure her sexual favours. To spare the court’s blushes, a prostitute masquerades as the Empress and receives from the Shah a massive pearl necklace. Two, if you count the one she can wear in the street.

There’s a duet about masturbation set to the music of a Strauss mazurka.

So far it’s Kismet crossed with The Merry Widow and a side order of Indecent Proposal.

In the second half those of us who returned to the airless auditorium were rewarded with a further descent into farce as first there’s a prison scene where the prostitute is reunited with her favourite client, a cardboard Baron played with more conviction than the production deserves by the explosive bass-baritone talent of Shuler Hensley. Hensley is most noted in the UK for his outstanding portrayal of Jud Fry in the National’s Oklahoma! where he briefly but powerfully diverted the audience’s attention from its seat-wetting adoration of Hugh Jackman, and subsequently in a string of Broadway hits including playing the Monster in Young Frankenstein.

She’s been in prison, he in alcoholic penury, but they come together as actors in a coarse vaudeville which summarises the plot all over again only to oom-pah-pah music, after which the authors clearly got bored with the plotting and tie up all loose ends in a single scene's worth of provincial pantomime. Three Strauss strains are briefly reprised – even though we’re all now back in Persia - and we stagger out to the bar to try to make sense of it all.

Apart from airfares and accommodation for the cast, it’s not an inexpensive production – costumes, set and lighting are way above the Menier’s usual budgets: the programme refers to a number of producer type individuals as ‘Enhancement for this production has been provided by …’. Presumably ‘Enhancers’ are Angels who haven’t a hope in hell of seeing their money back.

Maybe it’s a tax loss, maybe it’s just an aberration on the part of otherwise competent and talented individuals, but this has the feel of a work-in-progress, perhaps a tryout where the European setting will be more familiar to audiences, prior to an opening on Broadway. If so, it will need the kind of eighteen month long re-write that kept Sister Act so firmly out of town, or closed Imagine This in its second month.

Either way, the presence of so many fine actors and singers is a bait to lure audiences to a production which fails to deliver either as musical comedy or a genuine operetta.

Go on then, they should call it The Strauss-Trap.