UK Edition
Review
Achingly beautiful revival of an American Classic - 42nd Street, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, review
The Duchess of Cambridge attended the mother of all showbiz musicals last night, exchanging the pitter-patter of tiny feet at home for the stampeding frenzy of a tightly drilled army of hoofers in the grandest, most palatial theatre in town. “Hear the beat of dancing feet” runs a seductive line in the title-number of 42nd Street. And given that director Mark Bramble has recruited an unprecedented number of ensemble members (43) to occupy London’s biggest stage, it’s hardly hyperbolical to suggest they’d be able to hear that beat right down the Strand and along the Mall to Buckingham Palace. It’s an extraordinary, spine-tingling sound.
If you don’t like tap-dancing, run for the hills: 42nd Street is the tyrannosaurus rex of tap. What Bramble and co-writer Michael Stewart did back in the day (1980) was take a neglected Warner Bros 1933 classic, strip it down its essentials with only residual traces of the originating novel, and stuff in as many pleasure-giving songs from the gilded back-catalogue of Harry Warren and Al Dubin as possible, including that Depression-era paean to newfound wealth, “We’re in the Money”.
Producer David Merrick – who brought the show to Drury Lane in 1984, entrusting Bramble with its direction for the first time – said he was after the “biggest musical since the Second World War”. And size is absolutely everything in this shiny, streamlined homage to a vanished world of razzmatazz in which a poor, young out-of-town hopeful called Peggy Sawyer shuffles her way into the company of a fictional Broadway-bound musical (Pretty Lady) and then, laughing in the face of cliché, becomes the star of the show and an overnight sensation, smitten en route with the show’s slave-driver of a director Julian Marsh.
Give them a nudge, and doubtless the equality brigade could be up in arms about the female objectification: this show puts the nubile into New York. There’s a Busby Berkeley-esque number that sets a circle of prone, scantily clad chorines on a revolve beneath a giant mirror, splaying and closing their legs as they turn; an absurd, tasteful floral arrangement of fleshy suggestiveness. It’s miles apart from Hamilton in terms of diversity, too – almost the un-reinvention of the musical.
But that’s its charm. I loved it in the way one can’t help loving achingly beautiful things. It has tremendous spirit and more gorgeous technicolour (a shift of emphasis from the original Gower Champion staging) than even its predecessor here, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s no let-up from the moment the red velvet curtain rises – pausing to show tantalising rows of dancing feet – on a frenetic rehearsal scene, the company paddle-flapping in sync like demented penguins, right to the titular finale song, in which the dancers, all in silver and gold, cascade down a staircase, which lights up on cue, like a human lottery win.
Hats off to the principals – Sheena Easton thrilling of voice and haughty of mien as insufferable (and suddenly incapacitated) leading lady Dorothy Brock (trailed by Bruce Montague’s old-hound-dog of a sugar-daddy investor Abner), Tom Lister as the bellowing Marsh, and Clare Halse as the resplendent Peggy. But the garlands belong to the ensemble, dancing on the spot as if gliding on ice, wind-milling arms furiously yet gracefully. An American classic right royally revived.
From 4 April 2017 - 5 January 2019, buy 42nd Street tickets from Telegraph Tickets or call 0844 871 2118