Review The Wind In The Willows

The Wind In The Willows
A musical based on the novel by Kenneth Grahame
Book by Julian Fellowes
Music by George Stiles
Lyrics by Anthony Drewe

Country Diary Of An Edwardian Banker
https://www.windinthewillowsthemusical.com/

During the halcyon days of TLT's childhood, the sun shone forever above the ancient horse chestnut tree and dappled with its rays the parish school windows where the thrushes on the sill with throbbing breasts warbled their little hearts out.

Then the kindly schoolmaster took down from the wooden shelf The Wind In The Willows and read in rich and vivid tones a fresh instalment of life on the river bank to a rapt young audience.

The boys were dressed in caps and shorts and the girls in their gingham pinafores, all in a classroom comradeship with little Theresa and Jeremy clutching each other's small hands for comfort when the story took a darker turn.

Ok, ok that was almost complete fantasy ;)

However TLT's teacher did read a chapter a day at her state primary school. For hard as it is to imagine in our time of invasive weaselly mobile phones and computers, we  lapped up nourishing literary meals with Mole, Ratty and Badger while Toad, we thought, had a kinship with our own cheeky "naughtiest boy in the class".

Now a jolly musical version of Kenneth Grahame's classic, with music by George Stiles and lyrics by Anthony Drewe and book by Julian Fellowes, has brought the fight to preserve the status quo between the river bank and the Wild Woods on to the London Palladium stage.

Green fronds descend as the river bank comes to life on Peter McKintosh's ingenious tree ring set filled with concentric wooden circles for the rural landscape in contrast to the expressionist Toad Hall decorated with Louis XVI decadence and attended to by long-eared white rabbit flunkeys.

Craig Mather and Simon Lipkin make an engaging bespectacled West Country mole and streetwise water rat respectively - although somehow we realise their personas know their way around a mobile phone.

Julian Fellowes' book is pretty good and more or less faithful to the source material.

Yet there's a brisk modern slickness to director Rachel Kavanagh's staging which doesn't reflect the deeper resonance of the novel and its recognition of seasonal change and sense of troubling undercurrents.

Grahame himself had previously worked as Secretary to the Bank Of England where he was the victim of a bizarre assassination attempt. Not long after he took early retirement and wrote his most famous book which became a success after President Theodore Roosevelt was given a copy and lobbied for its publication.     

Maybe it was deemed too soon, hot on the heels of the Stiles/Drewe/Fellowes additions to Half A Sixpence (although the river bank musical was written first) to style the show as purely Edwardian. So there's also a 1950s and 1960s vibe sometimes reminiscent of the Ealing Studio comedies.

We have pencil-skirted air hostess swallows, even if the soprano trills of One Swallow Does Not A Summer Make are pleasingly from an earlier era.  The garish chief weasel (an excellent Neil McDermott) is a mid twentieth century spiv, surely Soho-based with his continental taste for pizza?

This takes somewhat away from the strange mix found in Grahame's tale and the drawings of the novel's most celebrated illustrator Ernest H Shepherd and into the realms of Disney.

While we wish there was a little more adventurousness and lateral thinking as to how to invoke and evoke the atmosphere of the novel with its thread of the supernatural, unease and potential savagery  in the costuming and staging, if we didn't know the book, we would accept the musical on its own terms.

Gary Wilmot is the stern Badger, with the tartan tie of a Laird but the authoritative English accent of a retired military man  of course has a fine set of lungs introducing a thematic, if somewhat all-purpose song, A Friend Is Still A Friend.

There are times when we wondered if we were on the threshhold of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat and Beatrix Potter tales but, sadly, never quite the weirdness of Grahame's Edwardian literary soulmate in mysticism, Saki.

But wait a moment, why are the headlights of TLT's automotive companion all a-gleam? Any adaptation of The Wind In The Willows must stand or fall by that prolix, blustering, egotistical but loveable road hog (to mix our animal metaphors) Mr Toad of Toad Hall.

Rufus Hound revs up and swings into action and gives good value as the menace on four wheels. It's all pretty efficient and the children seemed to love it (we asked a few in a post-show totally unscientific straw poll).

For us Kenneth Grahame's novel still colonizes our imagination.We did wonder if its conjuring up of a pastoral benevolently feudal river bank where mole and vole know their place with their homely unmortgaged holes might be enough for some to cheer on the weasels and the stoats in their attempted coup.

Nevertheless we were suckers for the prickly but endearing family of Baden Powell scouting hedghogs threatened by the motor car with a nod to Gilbert & Sullivan in The Hedgehog's Nightmare  and the delightful field mice with cute traditional wassailing chorals.

A friend is still a friend and a colourful and gently entertaining show is still an amber/green light show! 

Review Miss Atomic Bomb

Miss Atomic Bomb

by Adam Long, Gabriel Vick and Alex Jackson-Long

Having A Blast

https://www.stjamestheatre.co.uk/ 

It's a great strange story for a musical - or a play or a movie. During the 1950s' Cold War, Las Vegas and the state of Nevada turned atomic bomb testing into a commercial golden goose. 

Before the public knew the dangers of radiation fallout, tourists flocked not only to gamble but also to grandstand the nuclear mushroom clouds. And the burghers of Las Vegas invented a beauty pageant< Miss Atomic, roping in radiant (geddit?!) Las Vegas showgirls photographed in a fetching range of A-bomb inspired swimwear. 

A strong story - and TLT and her atomically charged little motor thought they could detect a  visceral and more complex history lurking beneath the muddled but slickly-performed piece that is Miss Atomic Bomb.

The story of this new musical from Adam Long (also co-director), composer Gabriel Vick and Alex Jackson-Long is roughly (very rough) this (deep breath):

Farm girl Candy (a hillbilly country and western  Florence Andrews, Dolly Parton with a touch of Doris Day) from Utah but a Californian wannabe, threatened with losing her trailer home to bank administrator Mr Potts (Daniel Boys in suited and booted evil form) after her grandmomma's death, is persuaded by small-town sophisticate chain-smoking best friend fashion designer Myrna (Catherine Tate) to compete for Miss Atomic Bomb prize money to clear the mortgage.

Meanwhile  Joey Lubowitz (soon-to-be Aladdin Dean John-Wilson), conscripted during the Korean War draft, goes AWOL and deserts the army in the desert (no, that's not a line from a song but a TLT excruciating pun!), running away to Las Vegas. Where his brother Lou (Simon Lipkin making the most of his role) runs a hotel but is threatened by Brooklyn mobsters. 

And a  mad professor (Stephane Anelli in fine animation adversary fettle) with his own secrets  is also paperclipped on to the plot. 

Between the foreclosure on the trailer and the crowning of the new Miss Atomic Bomb, there's a series of skits and turns involving the army, the showgirls - and a Hasidic rabbi disguise. Because Lou meant to order in a rabbit costume for Easter but instead ... Yeah, one joke which maybe should have been passed over ... 

Adam Long is, according to Wikipedia, a founding member of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and it does feel like a homage gallop through various musicals, plays, styles and issues instead of trusting to the strength of the real story and growing the themes from that tale. 

So, to take a more obscure example, we thought we got a hint of the first musical version of a Bernard Shaw play, The Chocolate Soldier, adapted from Arms And The Man, but the fleeing soldier is given a different label of ... well, we won't spoil the gag but a vegetable without rhyme or reason is involved.

There are also references to or pastiches of the opus of Jerry Herman, Babe the sheep-pig, Priscilla Desert Queen (mind you, Australia has its own nuclear test scandal), The Producers, Gypsy and maybe Calamity Jane, the play Angels In America, Dr Strangelove, The Desert Song  and Beautiful. 

In a small fringe venue or at the Edinburgh Festival,, this cartoonish revue could have been a hit but marketed as a bankable fully fledged musical, it doesn't feel at ease. Still it's never boring. There's serviceable hoofing (choreography by co-director Bill Deamer) and a few of the songs have wit in both form and content.

And, above all, there's a classy cast of performers who give their all with nuclear gusto. 

The projections from Jack Henry James transform the production with desert vistas. A harder edged and more intriguing story does occasionally peep through as when the showgirls come pageant contestants plaster on the smiles and belt out "vote for me".   

So with a green for the performances and red/amber for the story, it just about scrapes through into a glowing radioactive amber light.

Oh, and if anyone knows the whereabouts of the real 1952 Miss Atomic Bomb, Lee Merlin, as photographed by Las Vegas snapper Don English, there are people who really wanna know with a possible movie in the offing ....