Silent Film Musical

Often considered 'unproduceable', Jerry Herman's bouncily-scored backstage musical MACK AND MABEL gets a dark and distinctive reworking from talented director Thom Southerland, and is graced with an act of pure class in Laura Pitt-Pulford's beautifully pitched Mabel. At the Southwark Playhouse.

Johnny Fox12th July 2012

view the full review on One Stop Arts here

Insufficiently Dirty Gertie

Noel and Gertie – The Cockpit Theatre, London

Writer: Sheridan Morley

Director: Thom Southerland

Reviewer: JohnnyFox

The Public Reviews Rating: 

‘Noel and Gertie’ is a confection wherein the music, lyrics and play extracts of Noel Coward are used to illustrate the close friendship between the vastly talented author and his intermittent co-star but lifelong friend Gertrude Lawrence. In their stage heyday, they were as photographed, gossiped about and feted as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Hanging the music onto a narration is useful because while his contemporaries Cole Porter and the Gershwins, wrote sheaves of ‘girl meets boy’ songs which survive as standards, Coward’s work is more difficult to perform out of context, and modern audiences may not appreciate his themes which lament the passing of the empire or comment on English eccentricities.

Helena Blackman is every inch Miss Lawrence, capturing the hauteur, the recklessness and the insecurities as well as delivering the songs with a pitch-perfect capability Gertie herself didn’t always possess. Sail Away, written for the rasping tones of Elaine Stritch, transcends its source to become a torch song of immense beauty and delicacy.

Ben Stock is a touch too fresh-faced and eager for the langorous and louche mid-career Coward whose suave overconfidence was finely honed by his teens. However he plays the piano splendidly and paces the patter songs very well indeed: Mrs Worthington seems freshly hilarious however many times you’ve heard it.

Sheridan Morley’s 1982 dully chronological script is too politely adoring and glosses over both Coward’s romantic involvements and the racier episodes in Lawrence’s life: the army officer who declined to marry her because she was “pure Clapham”, the matinee her daughter entered her dressing room during The King and I to find a naked Yul Brynner with his head up Gertie’s hooped skirt, or the dubious allegations of a lesbian affair with Daphne duMaurier who famously said she’d rather have Gertie on a chaise-longue than in a double bed.

It’s a pity it can’t be updated, because with a bit of retrospective spice, this musically fine production might be even more enjoyable.

written for www.thepublicreviews.com and published 2 October 2011

Cross Section

Would it be churlish, even for me, to suggest that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s £32m sale of a Nazi-tainted Picasso to fund (just ten, tuition-fee only) bursaries for musical theatre students is merely another in a long line of tax-deductible publicity stunts for the noble Lord?



In a good weekend for musical theatre, I’ve witnessed two remarkable events. The first was an actual pay-day for performers in a profit-share production. Last Saturday, thanks to the generosity and good management of their producer, The Audience Club doyenne Angela Hyde-Courtney, the cast of Thom Southerland’s bouncy Jerry Herman compilation show at the Landor each received a white envelope of proper folding stuff at the after-show party.

This in itself is remarkable: few fringe productions generate more than beer money for their participants, and it often makes me feel uncomfortable that to keep ticket prices affordable so many actors and singers have to double a day job in Debenhams. When you don’t get paid, it could be argued you’re actually an amateur, except that the standard and the pool of talent washing around London for such work is so outstanding. In a cast most of whom were West-End-ready there were several shiners but none brighter than Daniella Gibb whose rendition of ‘Look What Happened To Mabel’ was impeccably focused and sung.

The second remarkable event is the SSSPOTTYs – or the Stephen Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year awards in which not only performances but also new composition is recognized with a secondary prize given by Betty Blue Eyes composers Stiles and Drewe.

Sunday afternoon’s finals at the Queen’s Theatre simply blew me away. Whilst the boys somewhat outshone the girls, the standard is again beyond excellent, and interestingly many of the finalists came from classical colleges like the Royal Academy of Music and RADA rather than the usual hothouses of Mountview, Central or ArtsEd Schools which is fast becoming the ‘Fame’ academy of the UK.

Winner Taron Egerton, making so much more of ‘Giants in the Sky’ than the piece usually gets in productions, and stand-out finalist Craig Rhys Barlow whose meticulous diction and body language combined in an electrifying ‘Franklin Shepherd Inc’, both proved that Wales still produces naturally talented singers.

The winning composition – a delightful humorous and tender piece in which a superhero tells a geeky kid that muscle doesn’t outrank brains, ‘It’s Not All Kaboom, Kapow’ by Eric Angus and Paul James from their adaptation of the Ayckbourn piece The Boy Who Fell into a Book was delivered by another highly promising baritone, Howard Jenkins.

I was so elated after the SSSPOTTYs I almost didn’t go on to the evening concert at Cadogan Hall where a range of more established performers were supporting London Gay Men's Chorus and the male rape crisis charity SurvivorsUK. Part of my reluctance was fuelled by the fact that the headliner was Lesley Garrett, but given it was for a deserving cause, I thought I’d give her the benefit of the doubt.

Shouldn’t have bothered, she was terrible.

I'm not sure which made me more annoyed - her ridiculous, shrill, too-high-in-her-range singing or the clumsy, campy way she claimed allegiance to the charity. Among the other stars, Hannah Waddingham in particular showed her up with her effortless phrasing and natural projection. Everyone else seemed to make a genuine and heartfelt connection to the Survivors cause, but Garrett came over as desperate-to-be-popular, and a fake.

Her song choices were bizarre – I Dreamed a Dream, Somewhere and The Impossible Dream - since Fantine dies aged 27, Maria is a teenager, and Don Quixote a virile young knight-errant, everything she sang was irrelevant and contributed to her delusional belief in her own ability, youth or popularity, none of which were evident from the Stalls.



Garrett compares piercings with the LGMC's David Clarke. Hers is in her voice. (photo: Mark Killien)

It’s such a pity. She and I are contemporaries and both grew up in Yorkshire, but whereas I couldn't wait to get away, Garrett clings to the Doncaster coal-face as though ashamed to relinquish a background she has long transcended. She’s obviously a very kindly woman if she’ll give of her time for a worthy event, and it must be quite a come-down after her festival career to sing in a half-empty Cadogan Hall – but it’s vastly irritating to see someone who COULD be so much better, and more real, if she abandoned any pretence of being either a great operatic singer (Verdi is not enhanced by a Yorkshire accent), or a soprano.

As a mezzo, she might have had the international career denied her by languishing in the ENO too long, and if she had some acting lessons she mightn’t have disgraced herself quite so badly in Carousel, when despite having only two numbers she almost never worked a full week.

Still, for every fading or deluded diva there’s a thousand up and coming musical theatre performers to cheer on and applaud. It makes even me optimistic.

Right Little Madam

There's a rash of American musical revivals in London at the moment, many of the best helmed by director Thom Southerland. This one's sandwiched between a punchy Mack and Mabel in Catford and a promising State Fair at the Finborough.

Madam was Ethel Merman's biggest career triumph after Annie Get Your Gun and casting any part she ever played is a minefield. Here, the role of brassy, crassy party-giving US Ambassador to ‘Lichtenburg’ Mrs. Sally Adams is in the sure hands of Beverley Klein, recently successful as Golde in Fiddler on the Roof, and particularly excellent as the Witch in the Linbury Studio ‘Into the Woods’.

In ‘Madam’ her vocal range is tested slightly as some of the songs fall uncomfortably between her chest and head voice, but she delivers power and pathos in equal measure eventually showing the vulnerable romantic beneath the steel magnolia.

The script has been butchered to fit the scale of the venue and production budget, and the political plot of whether or not the US should give a loan to the tiny Grand Duchy is mown down by the theatrical effect of so many excellent Irving Berlin melodies. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

Chris Love is winning as romantic lead Kenneth Gibson, as is Gido Schimanski - a dark horse of the musical theatre circuit and although in his late thirties still ‘discoverable’ - playing Sally's own love interest. The rest of the supporting cast look slightly as though Klein has invited her grandchildren round to tea, but they work darned hard and some of the choreography is brilliant in such a small space. The whole show's miked by the way, heaven knows why because the theatre's the size of my living room and Klein could, in most circumstances, fill a large hall without any assistance.

The Gatehouse is a friendly venue - actually a Wetherspoons pub with good value food and drink - with the invitation to ‘drink as much as you like’ firmly nailed to the doors of the auditorium, a risk not worth taking with some audience members ...