Review The Toxic Avenger

Peter Barker has a monster time as the universe's slimiest and greenest superhero preserves small town values and gets the girl.

The Toxic Avenger
Lyrics and Book Joe Dipietro
Lyrics and Music David Bryan

The Geek Goes Green
https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

The latest musical to open in London's West End is The Toxic Avenger, an enjoyable romp spoofing its way through American musical tropes, told with energy and wit.

The musical, with a book by hit musical Memphis's team of book writer Joe Dipietro and Bonovi's keyboardist David Bryan, is an adaptation of Lloyd Kaufman cult 1980s' superhero comedy movie about New Jersey nerd Melvin determined to seek out the culprits behind the toxic sludge stinking out his home town.

The toxic waste had been brought to Tromaville by the crooked mayor (Natalie Hope) and her cohorts. Melvin (Mark Anderson) finds proof of her complicity, digging out documents from the town's library archives.

He falls for the blind librarian, Sarah (Emma Salvo), an innocent party deliberately appointed by the mayor in order to keep secret a corrupt scheme polluting the area. She rejects  Melvin but fate plays a hand for our hapless protagonist.

Attacked by the Mayor's thugs and dumped in the toxic sludge, Melvin is transformed from weakling citizen to Toxie, badass mutant superhero out for revenge and a town clean up.

Suffice to say, lurid green Toxie gets his girl in the end, but not before plenty of setbacks to overcome and musical numbers written by Bryan and DiPietro.

A skilful  five-piece band  on a mezzazine, led by musical director Alex Beetsche, belt out the rock numbers with precision and gusto matching the confident delivery of Salvo’s Sarah, and Mark Anderson’s Toxie.

Designer Takis's  ingenious set of sewage pipes triples up as the library a hairdressers' premises and  a doctor’s surgery.

This show had its European premiere at Southwark Playhouse last year after earlier runs in New York and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

So it’s not surprising it is now a polished piece with director Benji Sperring back at the helm, although it's hardly subtle.

The show knowingly acknowledges its own silliness, with the cast scripted to ham it up, frequently breaking the fourth wall. It's even good natured and absurd enough to keep some of the jokes at the expense of librarian Sarah  from becoming offensive.

There's plenty of entertainment value, but there are times it becomes repetitive. In the second half, there's very little plot development even if the madcap antics continue.

This is an amusing and knowing evening in the theatre. The show has its flaws, but it's well-designed and energetically directed by Benji Sperring with choreography by Lucie Pankhurst.

Best of all, it delivers plenty of laughs, thoroughly deserving of a TLT amber and, naturally, stroke green 😉 light.

Review How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying

How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
Music and Lyrics by Frank Loesser
Book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert
Based upon the book by Shepherd Mead

Made In America
https://www.wiltons.org.uk/ 

In 1937 Tennessee Williams lost out in a University of Washington playwriting contest to several classmates, who were placed above him in the competition.  One of them was Edward Shepherd Mead. 

Mead, while working in advertising, went on to write the 1952 best-selling tome How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying satirizing office politics and the craze for self-help books. 

This became the source material, with the addition of the compulsory musical theatre romance, of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1961 musical of (amazingly!) the same name - even in French!

Williams, whatever happened to him? If only he had bought and read How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying before entering that play contest! ;)

Anyway, TLT and her own transportation widget were full of curiosity to see for the first time live the full-blown musical, which we hereby shorten from now on to How To Succeed. 

This musical, in an uneven production but still wonderful vocals at Wilton's Music Hall,  turned out to be as relevant today with the internet producing off-the-peg wisdom as it was over 50 years ago with the advent of television for the masses. 

It's a shammy-cloth to chairman-of-the-board tale. J Pierrepont Finch, like fictional elevator boy Thomas Krull,  starts off on the rise - in Finch's case as a window cleaner and stays upwardly mobile using the How To manual plus an improvisational instinct.   

The firm is the World Wide Wicket Company. Along the way he inadvertently makes an implacable enemy, the boss's nephew Bud Frump (Daniel Graham),  acquires a love interest Rosemary (Hannah Grover) and negotiates the temples of conspiracy that are the coffee machine, the men's washroom and the (all-male) boardroom.  

In the first act we did have rather overpowering doubts about the design. Sure, How To Succeed is a cartoon but if we were to find a British equivalent, it would be more in line with Bristow than the colours of children's TV. 

We really weren't sure about the fluorescent hair colours, elongated mens' shoes of unlikely colours, a personnel director who favoured the look of a Texan cowboy and we felt this all rather softened the edges of a sharp satire on something recognizable. 

For us also, Pickering's dark looks rather militated against the gentle, cherubic aspect of Finch. While Finch's adversary, Daniel Graham's Bud Frump has the more open-faced, all-American boy looks.  

Shepherd's book was subtitled A Dastard's Guide to Fame and Fortune. Without having seen it, we did wonder if this production was influenced by rhe recent Broadway hit The Gentleman's Guide To Love And Murder based on the same source material as the movie Kind Hearts And Coronets, also with a go-getting lead character. 

Andrew C Wadsworth plays the most consistent card as president of World Wide Wickets with the rousing Old Ivy and old-style duet Heart Of Gold with night club cigarette girl turned secretary Hedy La Rue (a statuesque Lizzii Hills).

And this  production with musical direction by Ben Ferguson and choreography by Lucie Pankhurst finally does come good but, my goodness, it takes its time.  

It redeems itself with a much smarter and better timed second act. Pickering's Finch with the love-song- duet-changed-to-solo song I Believe In You and Grover's Rosemary Happy To Keep His Dinner Warm (for the atmosphere of the time see Woman's World), amongst others, hits the spot.

It's an interesting show. Both book writer Abe Burrows, who drew on experiences working with Revlon, and Frank Loesser, himself the president of his own thriving music rights' company, Frank Music, had to be persuaded to take it on. 

Both were celebrated enough to have the leeway to build the musical around the original Broadway actors, as well as staying more or less true to the source material. The pirate treasure hunt element in the show was even built around a young choreographer's one forte while Bob Fosse did the majority of the work.

The echoes of other musical are not just there for show, we think, but a more complicated dramatic discussion about the - er - business. The song Rosemary for example guys all those songs which riff off a woman's name. 

It also comically samples Grieg's piano concerto in A, while maybe hearking back to one of the all-time greats in money-making musicals. And is there a sly glance even at West Side Story's Maria?  

And what Paris Original implied, where Rosemary buys a so-called exclusive creation to wear to impress Finch and then finds several work colleagues have bought the same, for creatives in the then era of burgeoning television hungry for material and now implies even for politicians and their spouses in the internet age - as Melania and Donald Trump found out ...  

We Brits are prone to think that we brought satire to the USA via the Cambridge Footlights. However there was healthy mockery there already in the 1960s,  also the era of MAD magazine and Tom Lehrer. Even the stage version of The Sound of Music has its psychologically satiric moments. How To Succeed comes from this tradition.
 
This is isn't a perfect production by any means but it has its own outstanding musical moments. A rip roaring finale of the revivalist-hymn-style The Brotherhood Of Man when Finch, JFK-style, draws the company together and also manages to save his own skin, gives us also the benefit of vocals from Miss Jones (Maisey Bawden). 

The audience, including your own president and vice-president of TLT, Inc, certainly left with smiles on their faces and we give this How To Succeed an upper level amber light. 

Review Children Of Eden

Children of Eden

Book by John Caird

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Based on a concept by Charles Lisanby

The Generation Game

 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

Along to The Union Theatre, that little ark of musicals which punches above its weight (a mixed metaphor if ever there was one!) for Children of Eden. Giving a new slant to ancient stories, this biblical musical uses the infinitely flexible dramatic framework of the Old Testament, the story of Adam and Eve and then Noah and The Flood.

To be honest, biblical musicals do not always rock our boat, so it was something of a surprise when we found ourselves gripped and, yes, unexpectedly moved by this many-layered fascinating show, directed here with panache and sensitivity by Christian Durham. 

Created by New Yorker Steven "Wicked" Schwartz and English director John "Les Miz" and "Nicholas Nickleby" Caird, this piece has at its core the initially joyous and then choppy and poignant relationship between parent and child and casts an Anglo-American eye on the Book of Genesis.

God, always called The Father in the show, is a Brit (a haughty yet affectionate Joey Dexter) and more like a clean cut corporate Chief Executive, General or modern King cum President, or a kind of Platonic financial regulator - and, above all, a human Dad. 

Yet his complacent best-laid plans go awry when he puts into practice his ideas. He's also a God who, as Children of Eden progresses, shows himself without the experience of sharing his life with an equal. In the end, without an absolute resolution, the Children of Eden have something to teach him.

The show has a chequered history and received less than kind reviews when it rushed into production in 1991 in an available but outsize theatre in London. With audiences then staying away, glued to their TV sets watching coverage of The First Gulf War,  it took several re-writes, community theatre and youth productions to produce the present version.

After a bit of a cheesy beginning (the show rather than the performers), TLT and her own right-hand fired-up chariot found their initial resistance broken down.  The child-like rhythms and simple tunes build up into something more complex as they reflect the increasing complexity and perplexity of this world from joyously newly minted to multifaceted experience. 

But maybe this makes it sound more complicated than it should for a bitter sweet lyrical tale with characterful choreography by Lucie Pankhurst which takes an audience of diverse belief and non-belief with it. 

American-accented Adam and Eve (Stephen Barry and Natasha O'Brien capturing affectively snub-nosed, wide-eyed infant delight in character and song)  joyously partake in everything around them.

Musical director Inga Davis-Rutter plays keyboard in the four-piece band which also includes bass, drums and reeds. In a pleasingly unmicrophoned performance, occasionally words do get lost but this is outweighed by clarity in the narrative and otherwise strong singing and affecting harmonies. 

The score carries the story through like links in the chain with inventive staging by Durham and design by Kingsley Hall with pastel nursery colours changing to harder edged grays and reds.

The journey starts from The Father's mighty preliminary act of imagination "Let It Be" put into reality  through Adam and Eve's entry into Eden with the diverting "The Naming" of animals, the first unaswerable question, all  leading naturally to Eve's divination of a pulsating living world with the possiblity of change in "The Spark of Creation".

The song titles give a clue that the chase for fulfilment is as much about new found lands and creative human aspiration through the company of others, in music or in any walk of life as Godly injunction. 

Gabriel Mokake as the snake brings humour, verve and a credible argument, along with the storytelling chorus, for eating the apple of knowledge in "The Pursuit of Excellence". 

And this is a show which brings dramatic life to fundamental arguments with reason, passion and lyricism on all sides within a family circle rippling out over generations.  

With a dynamic take onthe striking down by Cain (young Turk Guy Woolf) of Abel (wide-eyed Daniel Miles) destined never to reach manhood, the first act of the family saga ends in a touching plea by elderly widowed matriarch Eve for "second chances" fearing For yet taking pride in the brood of her creation. 

The second act is deliberately less fluent, the knots in the human story, as The Father seeks his ideal, become knottier and knottier. The first African-inflected song Generations introduces economically the passage of time and spreading of flourishing human tribes around the planet.

Yet the thread is continued by the doubling of the actors as the descendants of Adam and Eve and the contact with The Father ebbing and flowing as the humans pursue their own course. 

The story is followed though with the tale of Noah and Mama Noah, The Flood and youngest son Japeth (Guy Woolf again), defying his father to take the servant girl Yonah (Nikita Johal, with a native American look, stepping out of the storyteller chorus) as his bride. 

She becomes his wife - and equal - with the aspiration for the ideal always kept alive. Nevertheless there remains a troubling messier hurt, an irresolvable, contradictory unease alongside a story of release and redemption for future generations, giving this piece its modern currency. 

So, as we're only human, we award a green light for an enchanting, fresh minted take on ancient tales.