Review Judy!

A trio of singing marvels thrills Tim Gopsill in a musical bio-play about one of the twentieth century's most enduring Hollywood icons.

Judy!

by Ray Rackham 

Triple Threat

https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/ 

There’s a glaring problem that plagues the producers of all shows telling the life story of a great theatrical artiste: who is up to playing the lead role? All those good enough would have to be stars themselves.

When the star is a singer with a mighty voice that stunned generations, it is even harder; but when you have found your singer, she or he has got to act the part as well; and when the star carries a perplexing reputation combining big-hearted generosity, overbearing autocracy and tragic vulnerability, it becomes harder still.

On top of all these, you want to portray the artist’s whole life, and the great Judy Garland already took to the stage as a 12 year old girl. 

At least there's a clear solution to the final problem: you use different performers to play different periods of the star’s life.

In the case of Judy!, writer/director Ray Rackham’s amazing musical bio-play that has just transferred to the Arts Theatre, this solves the other problems too.

Three actors play the part; all can sing – and dance – and have been with the show since it opened at the London Theatre Workshop in Fulham. This was two years ago before a run at Southwark Playhouse.

It's currently at the Arts Theatre, a stone's throw from the former Talk Of The Town -  now the Hippodrome -  where Garland sang her penultimate concert. 

There is the cocky but tender young girl, born Frances Gumm played by Lucy Penrose, who dreams up her glorious stage name for herself; the neurotic singer - Belinda Wollaston - in her late twenties at the top of her game, launching her unsurpassed 19-week solo run at New York’s Palace Theatre.

Then middle aged Judy played by Helen Sheals, doped up with booze and pharmaceuticals, going down with the ship of her failing weekly TV talk show; always still a grand dame – “I’m a fucking legend,” she yells at CBS executive Hunt Stromberg – she's much too grand to bend to the intimate demands of the small screen.

There is a notable precedent for this way of dramatizing a stage life in Ray Cooney’s triumphant musical Elvis, which had a West End run 40 years ago before a national tour and then being revived in the 1990s. But that had rock 'n roll stars in the two senior of the three roles, Shakin’ Stevens and PJ Proby.

Elvis’s life – somewhat tame to my mind compared with Garland’s -- was told chronologically. However  Rackham’s structural trick, lifting Judy! above the level of a tribute show or run-of-the-mill jukebox musical to that of a serious play in its own right, is to blend the three different eras of life together. The narratives are introduced in reverse order but play continuously, mingling with each other. 

At times the Judys sing together – as when Wollaston's Palace Judy joins in with Penrose's youthful performer singing her first audition number, Jimmy F Hanley's Zing! Went the Strings of my Heart.

With the Arts Theatre being a relatively small house, there are no microphones; the natural singing therefore has an affecting nature rarely achieved with banks of speakers in big-theatre musicals. 

But Wollaston could probably sing unmiked in Drury Lane: she belts out Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody (music by Jean Schartz, lyrics by Sam M Lewis and Joe Young)  with some of the ferocity of Garland herself. 

All the music is acoustic. The ensemble has seven of the cast playing instruments on stage: three of them, Joe Shefer as Judy’s father Frank, Christopher Dickens as Stromberg and Tom Elliot Reade as fellow producer Roger Edens, are pianists.

Reade also plays violin. He and Chris McGuigan, playing Norman Jewison, a later triple Oscar nnominee, who survived one week as director of the Judy Garland Show, play reeds.

Don Cotter plays the legendary tycoon Louis B Mayer and the onstage drums and Carmella Brown doubles as both Judy’s devoted dresser Judith Kramer, and flautist in the band.

It may be true that the wonderful music does have the predictable downside that dialogue seems flat and dull beside it. The succession of hapless and handsome producers and directors becomes tedious, with the comings and goings charting her life at three different times, sometimes makes it hard to remember which is which.

Nevertheless,  there is the memorable clash between CBS Judy and TV executives is over her refusal to sing Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's Over the Rainbow, the song from the 1939 movie Wizard of Oz that made her a teenage star; she’s sick of it.

But the intertwined storyline and combination of singers does make for a magical finale. The show ends with Penrose, Wollaston and Sheals singing, quietly and unaccompanied, Over The Rainbow together. The audience goes crazy. 

Judy! could get a green light for that moment alone. It runs at the Arts Theatre until June 17. Beats me why not for a longer run. This is one of those musicals that could become the talk of the town and, like the performances of Judy herself, go on for ever.

Review The Frogs

The Frogs
Based on the play by Aristophanes
adapted by Burt Shevelove and Nathan Lane
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Ribbetin' Stuff
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

The set by Gregor Donnelly on the bijou stage at the Jermyn Street Theatre boded well. A back wall of riveted burnished copper plates with brown tarpaulin-like rigging cum platform with a promising resemblance to trampolines.

But you know those park signs by manicured lawns admonishing "Do Not Tread On The Grass"? This is a musical which might as well have had a large sign stating, "Do Not Jump"!

For instead of amphibian lift off and innovation, we have a constricted stage and stories which feel unfinished. This is the version seen on Broadway in 2004 with Nathan Lane's post 9/11 and post Middle East military incursion adaptation of the late Burt Shevelove's book

We had to think long and hard about this one.

The Frogs was originally a scabrous comic piece, throwing satirical, anxious barbs at a failing Athenian wartime economy, written by Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes.

Here, the Greek God of drama and wine, Dionysos (Michael Matus), drags his slave Xanthias (George Rae with a passing resemblance via the glasses to a Scots' Harry Potter or George Burns - we couldn't decide which) across the River Styx down to Hades - the Greek version of Hell. The god has resolved to engineer the resurrection of a deceased writer on earth who can combat the complacency of the Athenian populace.

The history  of this musical starts with Shevelove in 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbour bombings brought the United States into the Second World War. Shevelove, the director of Yale University Undergraduate Society, embarked on an ambitious project to mount the straight play in the swimming pool of the Payne-Whitney gymnasium at the Ivy League college. The Yale swimming team was entrusted with the task of bringing the eponymous frogs from page to pool.

Trampolines, swimming pools, whatever. Thirty three later, during the Vietnam War, a revival with five songs added by Stephen Sondheim, Shevelove's collaborator on the similarly ancient classics' sourced A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, fitted the artistic agenda of Yale's drama department.

Meanwhile a technical team tried their darndest to knock the enormous but acoustically-challenged pool into a suitable froggy den and the chorus this time included a young Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep and Christopher Durang.

Then over sixty years later than the original adaptation and after Shevelove's death in London, actor and stand-up Nathan Lane decided to take it out of the swimming pool on to the stage in the 2004 production. This included additional songs by Sondheim who had also been a schoolboy Latin and Greek scholar.

This version, despite an interesting set of lesser-known Sondheim songs, still feels it needs a larger more spectacular space to approach in any way the intended tone and mix. A confused book sadly feels  more clod hopping than a graceful leap from 405 BC to 2004 AD.

We also struggled with the writers' duel, transposed already in 1941 by Shevelove from Aeschylus and Euripides to William Shakespeare (in the current production sweet-voiced Nigel Pilkington) and (a clean-shaven more resembling the late Christopher Hitchens!) Bernard Shaw (Martin Dickinson)

Shaw was still alive in 1941 and with GBS's  highly dubious split assessment of Hitler's worth, Shevelove's choice of author might have meant a lot more then than now.

Still, as our magical book of incantations Wikipedia reminds us Shakes vs Shav was already a well-worn trope used by several writers. Eight  years after the non-musical Yale production, shortly before his death, Shaw contributed his own version in the form of a marionette show. Now The Frogs as a puppet show, there's a thought ....!

Director Grace Wessels manages to keep this  shaky vessel from capsizing even if sometimes this musical ship veers a little too near the rocks  and it feels rather crowded on stage with the non trampolines.

Matus makes a quaintly diffident Dionysos, with an unmasked Wizard-of-Oz personality, except when he conducts turf, or rather lion's mane, wars with his slave.

Sliding into sly digs at actors' lives with Virilla the Amazon ((Li-Tong Hsu) taking on a whole new internet meaning, there are points of sparky contact with the audience but these are doused almost as soon as they light up.

Jonathan Wadey has characterful moments with Charon the spaced-out boatman and Aekos, an equally grungy gatekeeper. Meanwhile Chris McGuigan is good value as Dionysos's half brother Herakles.

But The Frogs feels as if it needs far more layered wit and followed-through intellectual rigour. Apparently the original 1941 script is either not extant or inaccessible, but maybe  more excavating of original intent is needed to produce a successful 21st century book re-write.

But hey, this is really supposed to be about Sondheim and his music, isn't it? The five-piece band led by Tim Sutton on piano does a mostly superb job. It has to be said, however, there were some problems with the levels in the second half of the show after an impeccable first act.

Nevertheless, even if the songs themselves are certainly not entirely lacklustre, their place in a muddled book feels rather listless. There are glimpses of something rich and strange at brief moments but we did wonder whether there was also a large bit of padding with discarded offcuts of previous musicals.

Apparently the 1974 production was not a happy experience for Sondheim who, it's reported, found the head of Yale's drama department difficult to work with and we think it shows. In the end, we don't know if this piece can ever be a success without a spectacular setting, if it can succeed at all.

Better, we think, to  find an equivalent of The Frogs rather than try to shoehorn a unique classical text into a Broadway musical format or, in the case of Nathan Lane's revision, a Don Quixote quest.

It's a lower range amber light from our own Mount Olympus for a valiant matchbox attempt to breathe new life into a flawed musical.

Review Through The Mill

Through The Mill

by Ray Rackham

Judy, Judy, Judy

www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

Judy Garland's short but intense life and enormous singing talent spanned the age of vaudeville through radio and the movies to the advent of television for the masses. Interestingly Ray Rackham's Through The Mill is not a straightforward biography but a considered collage filtering her life through the changes in the entertainment world.

It's a tough ask to bring Judy's powerful and unique contralto voice to the stage. But having three Judys at different periods of her life, before and after the dependence on prescription drugs and drink had taken its toll, offers a certain leeway.

This also is a clever, seamless way of presenting, without explanation, a subtle but visceral visual and vocal symbolism for the three sister group from whence Garland emerged. 

Yet, while there are  resonant flashpoints where her life is distilled from several directions, there are also some dodgy American accents, along with clunky, too explicit wearing of knowledge on the play's sleeve and set pieces ending in some world weary witticisms..

Nevertheless there's a lot to enjoy and admire with a subject which can always make capital out of a ready-made  audience. There are some humdinger snippets of Garland songs chosen carefully as a shorthand to reflect on and drive the plot. 

Picking up on only the slightest but pointed references to politics, we even came to realise Judy's successful career coincided with many years of Democratic Party government in the USA (her life came to an end early in the Richard Nixon Republican administration).

The play also deliberately does not seek to dramatize Judy's well-known end but rather her instinct for survival. Beginning with the later life of the older Judy (Helen Sheals) , beset by financial, legal, addiction and health problems, harassed by the courts, lawyers, accountants and the Internal Revenue Service, Judy takes her first steps into ratings-driven television in the early 1960s. 

A decade earlier, fired from MGM, Judy (Belinda Wollaston)  tours with Sid Luft ending up at the refurbished vaudeville venue The Palace in New York, But at every turn, there is always the talented but insecure plump young girl, Judy Garland (outstanding Lucy Penrose), originally Frances Gumm,

The play is fluidly directed by Rackham on a two-storey set (designer Justin Williams) with the cast doubling as musicians and melting away into the background while remaining on stage. Her mother and father (Amanda Bailey and Joe Shefer), her dresser (Carmella Brown), her husband cum manager Sid Luft (Harry Anton), movie mogul Louis B Mayer (Don Cotter), producers George Schlatter (Perry Meadowcroft) and Norman Jewison (Chris McGuigan),  musical arranger Roger Edens (Tom Elliot Reade) and TV executive Hunt Stromberg (the excellent Rob Carter) all slot into the jigsaw of Garland's life .

There's a certain low budget rawness to the backdrop and costumes at times, but this is a raw if predictable tale. We could have done  with more of the ambiguity, visual questioning and undercutting of the usual story and its stereotypes, suggested in the second act. For example in the innovative use of make up (Leanne Steedman) and lighting (Jack Weir), with the banishment of Judy's mother Ethel from her life.  

This is a show that needs more polish and honing. Yet we're being picky because we feel it is already a cut above many biographical celebrity plays and  has the potential to hit all the right notes. Especially if it pursues more vigorously the interrogation, already present but rather half-heartedly, of the literary stereotypes, imposed on the biographies of many a flesh and blood diva - Monroe and Piaf,  as well as Garland. So for a play which certainly has the potential to go on singing, an amber/green light.