Review Death Takes A Holiday

Death Takes A Holiday
Book by Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone
Music & Lyrics by Maury Yeston

The Lost Weekend
http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/

With a sweeping melodic score, Death Takes A Holiday is a Tarot card fantasy where the Grim Reaper out of a scientific curiosity, he claims, abandons his scythe for three days to experience life.

He settles on the aristocratic Lamberti family who, along with many others, have known their share of tragedy during the Great War with the loss of their pilot son Roberto, leaving them with a sole child, their daughter Grazia. And of course with Death on vacation, there are no obituaries in the newspapers because there are - no deaths ...  

Death Takes A Holiday the musical, first produced in 2011 but in the pipeline for far longer, is something of a curiosity in itself. For it feels very much like an experiment to find a musical for a bellicose twenty first century which ended up with some beautiful silken songs, maturing from May to December of life, hanging from its skeleton.

Set in 1922 on Lake Garda, it veers in tone between melodrama, pantomine in the comedia dell arte sense, light operetta alongside a shimmy of the 1920s' jazz age, even with a touch of Mozart and a definite nod towards the lush romanticism of Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Bookwise, there's a hint of The Great Gatsby, a smidgeon of The Rules Of The Game. Maybe even a flash of The Magic Mountain and Women In Love.

Death here embodied by dark and square-jawed  Chris Peluso is a war-weary foot soldier, with a trace of a more selfish instinct, who feels he deserves leave from his trade to explore why human beings cling to life so tenaciously

Zoë Doano is a reckless, Scott Fitzgerald type of heroine out for thrills as Grazia.The solo songs, despite the strong voices, mostly nevertheless feel interchangeable. Even if they are an object lesson in how to push forward the story with shades of Beauty and The Beast and the ticking clock of Cinderella.

It's the duets and other songs for the whole company which begin to inject the energy. Starting with the stately Death Is In The House sung by Duke Vittorio Lamberti (Mark Inscoe) and his zany servant Fidele (James Gaunt) with the stirring and finally ironic Life's A Joy, a turning point in mood.

While Alice (a vivacious Helen Turner), formerly engaged to the dead pilot, teaches Death aka  Russian prince Sirki the latest jazz-age dance from Paris streets filled with former American GIs, the aviator's former colleague Eric sings of Roberto's last flight (a superb Samuel Thomas), the very moment of death.

A personal favourite was the change of pace in the operatic opening of the second act Something's Happened. The trio of Grazi, Daisy (Scarlett Courtney) and Alice in the intricate Finally To Know continue the more complex momentus.

The ambiguous but soaring vocals of More and More, a duet for Sirki and Grazia give equal depth and a lift to the story.

Meanwhile the waltzing musical box December Time is a heartfelt multi-faceted reflection from Grazia's ailing grandmother (Gay Soper) and her loyal admirer Dario (Anthony Cable) proving ripeness is all: "All good poetry takes time/You don't hear the final rhyme/Until you reach December time".

With a haunting ivy clad gray stone villa set designed by Morgan Large, delicately and precisely lit by Matt Daw, Tom Southerland directs a fluid production, costumed with panache by Jonathan Lipman.

Yet, as the set opens and closes to reveal the courtyard and then the inside of the villa, it does feel cramped on the Charing Cross Theatre stage and the supernatural, cinematic feel to this tale seems to demand a larger space.   

Death Takes A Holiday was originally a 1924 theatre-of-the-grotesque play by Alberto Casella, two years after Benito Mussolini's ascent to power, the murderous demolition of the opposition socialist party, the dwindling power of the Italian monarchy and its aristocracy. After a slow-burning success on Broadway in an American adaptation, it was first a successful 1934 vehicle for actor Frederick March and much later a three-hour (!!!) movie, Meet Joe Black, with Brad Pitt.

While he was long dead by 1924, this secular parable reminded us of British satirist Saki but played mostly for romance and broad comedy with only a ghost of his mordant, macabre wit.  Part of the problem structurally, it seemed to us, is that the musical's USP (unique selling point) is revealed early on, draining the tension out of what follows.

Sure, Death really is Death, the Grim Reaper. But he could equally be one of the bitter, forgotten men of the post World War One generation, a hypnotising con man (logically taken. the ending actually confirms Death himself is a bluffer) or even a spy with matinee idol looks. He takes on the dead body of a suicide, a white Russian playboy gambler,  Prince Sirki of Belarus. But in 1922 - a Prince of Belarus ...?!! With a more explicit double edge, Death and the Prince might take on a more layered resonance. 

Still  by 2011, we'd had our fill of conflicts again and, with women now front line troops alongside the men, there could be an added poignancy chiming with the rather sudden ending of this rumination on the destruction of the First World War and the breaking of bonds. While it's an uneven musical, there's still a potency in the red rose that does not wilt with the suspension of death, a transient moment of hope and it's an amber/green light from TLT. 

Review Titanic

Titanic

Music and Lyrics by Maury Yeston

Book by Peter Stone

And The Band Plays On

http://www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/show/26/Titanic+

Watching the ever-enduring history of the Titanic passenger liner in this musical, which originally opened several months before the 1997 release of the  Oscar winning movie,  a thought began to form. What if this version of the famous story, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, book by Peter Stone, had bundled together echos of other tales of overweening pride snd technological innovation followed by disaster?

For whatever the truth about the Titanic, and the musical follows a traditional trajectory taking on board what may be newspaper embellishments and legal fictions of the official enquiry's many vested interests, this is an archetypal Icarus story.

It charts the history of the passenger ship's ill-fated  transatlantic journey when it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 with the loss of over 1,500 lives. Meanwhile the chairman of the company who was on board, Bruce Ismay (a sonorous David Bardsley)  lived on to be cast in real life as the villain of the piece, an Icarus who survived.

From the start in the Yeston/Stone version, the over-confident executive boasts the qualities of the new ship as much for competitive commercial reasons as pride - a floating city to compare with the wonders of the world, but unlike them, soon to be set free from its moorings to sail the ocean.

Nevertheless listening closely to Yeston's lyrics and Stone's book, there  were delicate echoes of other stories. Fritz Lang's movie tale of technology run rampant, Metropolis and HG Wells's stock exchange fable,Tono-Bungay with the talk of "cornering the market". 

Or maybe (should we whisper it?) even the perilous and expensive act of putting on a full-scale new musical underpinned by a crazy paving of financial, intertwined with artistic, interests - and a possible closing night blame game.   

The current run is a revival of director Thom Southerland's 2013 Southwark Playhouse production,  a cut-down chamber version of the original musical with a seven man (and woman).band of strings and percussion and a 20-strong cast, some of whom double up.

David Woodhead's two tiered set of riveted metal panelling, white railings and laddered crow's nest on wheels ingeniously also uses both the stage and circle balcony to evoke the sides and different decks of the  luxurious ship. We are in the midst of a vessel's first voyage from Southampton but also what had become a habitual journey for the ultra rich and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the moderately well-off and those, mostly poor,  seeking new lives in America.

Yet the musical is also a waterlogged dream, as conjured up by the smoke gray blue rivetted panels, plus the grainy lighting (Howard  Hudson) poking through  the portholes and the eerie ship's hums and rumbles (sound by Andrew Johnson) in the opening moments.

The ship's builder Thomas Andrews (Siôn Lloyd) sits calmily perusing his blueprints of the Titanic's brave new world  for all those seeking the fruits of an age of progress, where the future could only be  larger, cleaner, faster.

The lives of those on board are brought to the fore, with their own ties to land, either in solos, duets or choral set pieces. There's the miner Barrett (Niall Sheehy), who could have stepped out of a DH Lawrence novel, turned ship's stoker. He finds an unlikely ally in the perfectionist Marconi wireless operator Bride (Matthew Crowe). 

The latter who out of kindness and pride in his work, but maybe also in an unwitting revelation about the Royal Mail contracted ship, offers Barrett a hundred percent  "commercial discount" to send a message back to his girlfriend.  This culminates in a delightful duet as he  translates Barrett's love letter into Morse code dots and dashes.

It felt to us by sticking to the stories which circulated about the sinking, whether true or not, the feel of the instability of the legend comes through. The First Officer Murdoch (Scott Cripps), the second in command and on the bridge when the ship struck the iceberg,  confessed near the beginning  to shying away from commanding a vessel because of the responsibility involved.

The captain (Philip Rham), the master of the ship, who holds the lives of those on the Belfast-built vessel in the palm of his hand, and despite forbidding alcohol on the bridge, seems increasingly sucked into the louche partying on board and loses, literarally and metaphorically, his bearings. Yet it is Murdoch who takes the blame, as if he were bailing out water on one side, little knowing it would pour in on another, and he ends his life as if he were a guilty man.

With memorable work from the wide-eyed steward Etches (James Gant), social climbing but startling realistic Alice Beane (Claire Machin) and the three "Kates", Irish immigrant girls (Victoria Serra, Jessica Paul and Scarlett Courtney), there is a high standard of singing,  acting and dancing (musical stager Cressida Carré) from all the cast.

The world of brash overconfidence, the super wealthy, the aspirational poor looking towards a land of opportunity still exists. The stirring symphonic score spans twentieth century musical styles with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan, Irving Berlin, Rogers & Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim amongst others. 

The angle on the well-known story presented in the musical Titanic still inhabits a recognizable world in our post 9/11, post Concorde, post credit crunch, post invasion twenty first century age. Even if it may be hubris to think that a mere musical carries such a heavy burden. 

The book of  almost documentary precision highlights how  keeping to the story as reported,  can, in a very natural way, reflect on other man-made events and disasters the audience knows to be in the future. A green light for a thoughtful and resonant ensemble piece.