Review On The Town

On The Town
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Book and Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

Revolving Doors
https://openairtheatre.com/

There's something thrilling about a chorus of enchanting voices floating up into the sultry air when twilight draws in at leafy Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. And with songs like Lonely Town, I'm So Lucky To Be Me and Some Other Time with its collective sigh, "Oh well", how can one resist this tale of the fleet and fleeting love?

It was adapted from wartime hit Fancy Free, a short ballet conceived and choreographed by Jerome Robbins with score by Leonard Bernstein - both 25 at the time - about three US Navy sailors on  shore leave who end up fighting amongst themselves for a date with a pair of young women.

A few months later and at the age of 26, Robbins and Bernstein had added a musical to their increasing list of successes with Betty Comden, just a year older, and Bernstein's flatmate Adolph Green, barely 30 years old, writing the book and lyrics.

Its origins in dance and wartime uncertainty give the show a particular ensemble and snatched pleasures' flavour with an open ending. The framework of  sailors whose first trip to New York will always be a transient one.

The departure as another ship with another crew draws into the harbour puts the three young men, Gabey (Danny Mac), Chip (Jacob Maynard, a last minute replacement for the injured Fred Haig) and Ozzie (Samuel Edwards) in the spotlight before they melt back into ranks of the Navy.
 
This is followed through as they descend into the subway to start sightseeing in the hell-uv-a town and encounter Miss Turnstiles - on a poster.  However, unknown to sailor Gabey who is smitten by the image, the publicity turnstiles turn every month to create another short- term subway seductress advertising the city's transport system.

Directed by choreographer Drew McOnie with Tom Deeering's musical direction,  there's plenty of storytelling through dance on Peter McKintosh's dockyard packing crate set (complete with traffic lights!) and with Vogue-style costumes of sparkling colours.

The sailors in the spirit of naval fraternity search for Gabey's Miss Turnstiles aka Ivy Smith (Siena Kelly), the Bronx ingénue in debt to her blowsy singing and dancing teacher Madame Dilly (Maggie Steed), Ozzie and Chip respectively encounter and pair off with a statuesque rapacious, nymphomaniac blue stocking (Miriam-Teak Lee) Claire De Loon and brassy blonde yellow cab driver Hildy Esterhazy (Lizzy Connolly).

With Comden and Green coming from the left-leaning revue nightclub scene, there is a revue structure to the show with plenty of in-jokes  about then current fads for anthropology and psychology and pastiches of opera and the experimental off Broadway theatre scene. 

So it's easy enough to classify it as a period piece with the bonus of luscious tunes and witty lyrics ("The Bronx is up and the Battery's down") and for modern tastes there may be longeurs. Yet this is a solid production and we would feel churlish in withholding a top rating because some of its cultural references feel dated.

The wit still shines and  audience are still whirled through the turnstiles into -  in the words of So Lucky To Be Me - what a day. It's a green light for landlocked romance in a love letter to New York  amid the greenery and birdsong of Regent's Park. . 

Review The Wild Party

The Wild Party
Music and Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa
Book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C Wolfe

The Ballad of Queenie
https://www.theotherpalace.co.uk/

Have you had the invite, strictly word-of-mouth of course, to the party Queenie and her boyfriend Burrs' apartment? The Wild Party, the musical was first performed on Broadway in 2000 and now arrives in London to flaunt its wares.

Queenie (Frances Ruffelle) and Burrs (John Owen-Jones) are vaudeville entertainers: she is a chorus girl, he is a clown with a neat line in Al Jolson-like crooning in another act. They have a stormy relationship, but once in a while draw together to have a party for their ne'er-do-well friends and acquaintances.

It may be the time of Prohibition, but the gin flows liberally in the bathtub and there's a host of guests sprawled around to enjoy the hospitality - and the cocaine. Guests include faded diva Delores (Donna McKechnie) and Queenie's rival Kate (Victoria Hamilton-Barritt) with whom she has a love-hate relationship. Dissolute playboy Jackie (Dex  Lee), who swings both ways and sibling dance act Phil and Oscar D'Amano, sexually ambiguous in more ways than one (Gloria Obianyo and Genesis Lynea).
 
Directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie, the show is divided into five parts - the original Broadway production had vaudevillian placards to emphasize this was a kind of Chorine's Progress. The set, designed by Soutra Gilmour, is a shabby-chic dark red and black speakeasy with an arc of bulbs, as on a dressing room mrror, stretching from the orchestra on the second storey to the floor below.

The musical is based on a racy 1926 poem by Joseph Moncure March,  written in the style of a folk ballad with jazz-like inflections and its own choppy publication history - it only found a publisher two years later and was banned in Boston.

It then fell into obscurity and eventually the public domain. It re-emerged in the 1990s when cartoonist Art Spiegelman created new illustrations and a fresh edition was published.

Frances Ruffelle is a feisty, voracious but vulnerable Queenie in her relationship with the almost Bill Sikes-like John Owen-Jones's Burrs. Yet we did feel that once all the characters are established for the audience there is nowhere for them to go. The poem has a slight predictable plot, playing on sometimes crude stereotypes and low life but makes up in style and possible metaphor what it lacks in  a compelling Beggars' Opera story. However the musical does nothing to remedy the plot deficiencies.

The wildness of the party has a way of outstaying its welcome without advancing the plot. Perhaps it was a mistake to strip the show of the vaudeville/silent film placards. Whatever,  the jazz age-inflected songs tend to merge into one with honourable exceptions such as Welcome To My Party and the embodiment of Queenie and Kate's spikey relationship Best Friend. 

Still, the choreography is thrilling and there are some fine individual performances (the interpretation of the D'Amano Brothers is inspired). It's an amber light for a perfectly solid, if not flawless, beginning at the re-branded The Other Palace.