The Boy Friend – Menier Chocolate Factory The best tonic I can give you for the post-Christmas doldrums is a trip to see The Boy Friend at the Menier Chocolate Factory. If you don’t emerge from this one singing, dancing, and grinning like a fool, I suggest you check yourself into the nearest nursing home. Unless you are very young you will find that you know every song of Sandy Wilson’s irresistible souffle of 1920s nonsense, through the eyes of his innocent post-War 1950s. You will be able to imagine yourself spirited away to the very exclusive girls’ finishing school on the French Riviera where all the girls are ravishing, all the boys are gorgeous, and the Charleston is the main means of communication. By the end of the show’s single day, you will have found the perfect boy and agreed to marry him, and your parents, who will have managed to turn up unexpectedly, will approve of him because he will be revealed to be, not the messenger boy he originally presented as, but the son of a Lord. The boys and girls are endlessly talented and charming, they sing adequately and dance brilliantly and how they’re going to keep up this energy level for 8 shows a week for an entire run I can’t imagine but I have to single out one young woman who has just graduated recently from my old school, Arts Educational. Her name is Gabrielle Lewis-Dodson. Yes, a mouthful I know, but worth remembering because she is going to be a star. And this was the show that made a star of Julie Andrews. The Boy Friend has many pleasures, not least the grown-ups in the cast. The director, Matthew White, has taken unusual care with his casting, presumably looking ahead to a West End or Broadway transfer, although the first stop looks as though it will be Toronto, which has now emerged as a major centre of musical theatre. He gives us Janie Dee, until recently leading the cast of Follies at the National Theatre, who brings her extraordinary three-fer talent (singing, dancing, acting) to the lively role of the finishing school principal, Madame Dubonnet. Utter perfection. As if that were not enough, he brings a very high class couple, Issy van Randwyck and Adrian Edmondson, to the apparently unimportant roles of Lord and Lady Brockhurst and they make them both into something special. Edmondson manages the impossible trick of making a dirty old man loveable, and van Randwyck performs one of the funniest drunk scenes ever without losing her aristocratic aura for an instant. It’s all just lovely. All this happens by means of 15 charming songs and about the same number of dance routines - tap, modern, and soft shoe - all employing the same rather limited 1920s movements beautifully synthesised by choreographer Bill Deamer into fooling us that he’d discovered some new ones. In this, he has the enthusiastic partnership of designer Paul Farnsworth’s period sets and costumes which fit precisely into the atmosphere of carefree ‘20s style. Don’t ask whether the 1920s were actually this carefree nor whether we should buy in so wholeheartedly to a system of upperclass uselessness where the only ambition of Madame Dubonnet’s charges is to find a boy friend, and soon a husband, while the men’s is to drink as much as they can and molest the girls. Don’t ask, as I say, because if you don’t, the rewards are so rich. By the way, readers over 50 will remember Round the Horne, the immensely popular weekly radio comedy which never failed to include a sketch which began, “I’m Julian, and this is my friend, Sandy”, an introduction that even today is code for a particular kind of light-hearted gay comedy. Well, Julian was Julian Slade, who wrote the other great musical of the 50s, Salad Days, and Sandy was our own Sandy Wilson who wrote The Boy Friend. The Duchess of Malfi – Almeida Theatre There’s lots of blood dripping in this Duchess. I mean LOTS of blood. And it’s all black which is a novelty and has the effect of distancing the fact from the substance. I love this play, Webster’s masterpiece, not least because in 1612 to make a woman the focus of a play and to make her tragedy both political and personal, was almost unthinkable. Sure, we’d had Elizabeth 1, never married, who had recently died, but that was England and she was unique. In this play, set in the South of Italy, remarriage was frowned upon. And as soon as we hear that the Duchess’s wicked brothers are implacably opposed to her remarriage following the death of her husband, the Duke of Malfi, we know that she will remarry, that she will do it for love, and that she will die for it. And so she does. The first three acts of this five act play are devoted to her love for her steward, Antonio, and their domestic life with their children, all the time playing a cat and mouse game with her brothers to hide their marriage. They know it will unravel eventually but they manage to produce four children before it does. Once their perfidy is exposed, nothing will save them. Then, the killing starts, lots of black blood. But the Duchess is no pushover. She is, as she insists before they kill her, “Duchess of Malfi still”, one of the best and most defiant lines in all the dramatic literature. She is still the ruler of her duchy and only the madness and jealousy of her brothers is standing in her way. This is an unusually young and vulnerable Duchess, Lydia Wilson, her brothers more avaricious and mad than the usual run of Malfi villains. In this modern dress production these young characters force a confrontation which is truly scary and Chloe Lamford’s wonderful glass box encloses them in a set which emphasises how trapped each of them is. It separates them from each other and from themselves. Retreating into that glass box makes true communication between them impossible. As with her productions of Summer and Smoke and Three Sisters, Rebecca Frecknall’s casting is hit and miss. It is interesting that at the start of the play they seem to be a relatively happy family which falls apart over the brothers’ intransigence and the Duchess’s insistence on living her life her way. What is worthy of attention here is the idea of a seemingly powerful woman with no power over her own life, surrounded by men who wish her harm. Poor Antonio (Khalid Abdalla, somewhat lacking in charisma) seems terrified by the idea of marrying the Duchess, (who can blame him?) and being a mere steward, not an aristocrat, he is unable to support her in the face of her brothers’ perfidy. Nobody is on her side and even the playwright seems ranged against her from the outset. This makes Lydia Wilson’s performance even stronger as her Duchess is determined to live her own life, with the man of her choice and the love of her children. She knows, and we know, that she doesn’t stand a chance and, sooner or later, there will be a lot of black blood on the glass walls and some of it will be hers. West Side Story - Curve, Leicester And what did I do for fun this Christmas/Hanukkah/Stuffing my face Season? Two things, (other than eating, which I did every day and all the time). Two things, not for work but entirely for my own pleasure. I went to Leicester to see a wonderful production of West Side Story at the Curve. It’s young cast did Bernstein/Sondheim/Robbins proud. The songs stand up as the timeless classics they are, unwilling to be constrained within categories such as ‘classical’ or ‘jazz’ or ‘pop’ but soaring individually and collectively as works of genius. The only disappointment in an afternoon of sheer joy was that they have replaced Jerome Robbins’ ground-breaking dances. The new choreography, by Ellen Kane, is good. It’s just not as good. I’m sure that too would have stood up to the passage of more than 60 years since that finger-clicking feast that changed stage dancing forever. And, believe me, Ms Kane, it’s no shame to be nearly as good as Jerome Robbins. Fascinating Aida - Queen Elizabeth Hall The other thing that made my holiday season bearable was my busman’s holiday visit to the South Bank to see Fascinating Aida. This cabaret trio – Dillie Keane, Adele Anderson, and Liza Pulman - are among my favourite entertainers in any category, anywhere in the world. For the uninitiated, FA, as they are known to their fans, are three women of, ahem, a certain age, who sing. They do a lot more than sing. Led by the indefatigable force of nature, Dillie Keane, it’s what they sing as well as how they sing it, that makes them irresistible. Most of their material consists of comic songs which they write themselves and their stock in trade is the everyday fun and disasters attendant on being grown up women with grown up interests and concerns. They look great and sound even better, and they are so professional that they seem to be making it up as they go along. Sound like a contradiction? It’s not. That’s a tough trick to pull off, what appears to be three nice women having a chat is actually a meticulously rehearsed tour de force and the fact that there are three of them, very different from one another but blended with voices and movement interlocking perfectly, is a kind of miracle. They’re the paradigm of cabaret for me and I’d cross an ocean for them. In fact, recently, when they were appearing at The Pheasantry, which they all do regularly, I did.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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