THAT OL’TIME WESTERN DREAM OF 1979
I’ve a weak point for this little theatre underneath the arches and its Players’ Bar. Honouring a music-hall historical past, and with among the least expensive stalls seats in London, it usually hosts smallscale however decided new musicals. Which is , after all, a medium with a excessive potential to be lifeless ropy. Yet there are joyful recollections and discoveries to be made. Here TITANIC – later touringly profitable – was a delight, REBECCA was a good evening out, and George Takeis ALLEGIANCE an excellent true private story advised with ardour. So – admiring the cowboysish rust-draped and fringed gallery and illuminated stars – I settled to this one with the same old hopes. Some of them bore fruit, although infuriatingly not sufficient.
The e-book is by Dennis Hackin, a love story to his mother and father’ obsession with the previous pioneer West. Chip Rosenbloom & John Torres wrote music and lyrics, with Michele Brourman. Quite a gang effort. It imagines a touring Wild West present in a truck which serves as residence and circus tent (properly realized in a giant revolving field by Amy Jane Cook). Apparently it did nicely in LA and elsewhere, and right here a British forged hurls itself at it with manic vitality, as befits an oeuvre whose inspirations in line with the director Hunter Bird embrace Frank Capra, the Muppets, Joan Collins in Dynasty, Roy Rogers, and Buffalo Bill. The setting is 1979, chosen apparently as a result of “the country’s going crazy, partisan politics, civil rights threatened, technology exploding” and everybody wants an escape (Mrs Thatcher’s election will get known as a part of this apparently terrifying yr).
The story is exuberantly cartoonish : don’t go in search of refined emotions, although Tarinn Callender as Billy manages to edge in the direction of actuality when he remembers a childhood in a Bronx boys’ residence, Vietnam service, divorce and jail time period, all delivered inside minutes. He has collected his ramshackle troupe to fulfil the showbiz dream. One is a conjurer, one other a stiltwalking clow, and Karen Muvundukure is a giant, massive wild voice who introduces all of it. Josh Butler on, I’m joyful to report, a really energetic skilled debut as Lasso Leonard will get the deathless lyrics “there ain’t no feelin’/ quite like stealin’ cars”.
But this low-hope circus all of a sudden recruits by chance Antoinette (Emily Benjamin), one other nice voice recent from serving as alternate in Cabaret. She is a chocolate-bar heiress whose husband and stepmother – as we see in neat drop-in New York scenes) need to kill her for the cash inside thirty days (“drink your murderatini” says the husband, top-of-the-line traces in it). Hence her flight to the travelling circus. The drawback is that the villains are a lot extra enjoyable than the goodies; Victoria Hamilton Barritt because the Dynastyish diva stepmum raises the temperature with sheer bodily presence and vitality at any time when she’s on, as does Alexander McMorran because the hit-man, Sinclair St Clair .
But though there have been nice laughs round me on the matinee, the jokes are oversignalled, and solely a few songs provide a chance of surviving – notably `Just a Dance” and “Everything is Real”. Most disappointingly, regardless of being set amid the everlasting cowboy dream, all of it attracts more durable on bubblegum pop and soft-rock than on the fabulous legacy of Country and Western craving and journey. Not a reminiscence of it, not anyplace that could possibly be seen. Why would you throw apart a five-star winner connection like that? Bring on the harmonicas and hooves.
Still, as one track says it’s `’time to flee for an hour or two / from a world that’s overwhelming you” . I wished it to be higher.
charingcrosstheatre.co.uk to 7 april
score 3
