If you like musicals staged with machine-like precision, then this is the show for you.
But however welcome it is to see Sheena Easton on stage – and the dancing is excellent – there is something curiously heartless about this revival of a musical first seen on Broadway in 1980. In all honesty, I’ve been more moved by a military tattoo.
The story, which derives from the 1933 Warner Brothers movie, is the ultimate backstage fairytale. As a big musical is on its out-of-town try-out in Philadelphia, its superannuated star breaks her ankle. But just as the tyrannical director, Julian Marsh, is about to close the show, the cast implore him to let one of the chorus, Peggy Sawyer, take over.
A touch improbably, she has 36 hours in which to learn six songs, 10 dances and 25 pages of dialogue in time for the New York opening but she does it – prompting Marsh to utter the now famous-line: “You’re going out a youngster but you’re going to come back a star.”
There were only four songs in the movie, but the show raids the back catalogue of Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin (lyrics) to give us such bonuses as Go Into Your Dance and Lullaby of Broadway.
It is, however, just as well that the dancing distracts us from some of Dubin’s dubiously sexist lyrics. In this day and age it is astonishing to hear the chorus sing, in Keep Young and Beautiful, “What’s cute about a little cutie is her beauty, not brains.”
The book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble also sometimes beggars belief. You wonder how the actor playing Peggy keeps a straight face when, after her first-night triumph, she tells the bedazzled Marsh: “You were inside me pulling the strings.”
What keeps the show alive are the dances, and Bramble as director and Randy Skinner as choreographer stage them with well-drilled exactitude. There is a nod to Busby Berkeley in a scene where female legs are used to create geometric patterns reflected in an overhead mirror. In We’re In The Money the chorus tap furiously on drum-shaped nickels and dimes. The title-number also allows the cast to evoke the gaudy glitz of New York’s most celebrated thoroughfare.
The energy displayed is remarkable but there comes a point when one craves a little humanity. You get a touch of it from Easton who, in I Only Have Eyes For You, reveals a raw tenderness that belies the show’s assumption that the ageing star is over the hill. Clare Halse as Peggy dances well without persuading you the character would become an overnight star and Tom Lister as the autocratic Marsh lacks the menace that Jerry Orbach brought to the role on Broadway.
Much of the best work comes from the minor characters: in Shuffle Off To Buffalo, Christopher Howell as an errant groom and Emma Caffrey as his luscious bride provide welcome comic relief. But, while I’ve admired this show in the past, the current version feels more like a savourless replica than a re-imagined revival.
Until 22 July. Box Office: 0844 412 2955