HAVING THE BEST OF TIMES IN THE PARK
Even in familiar classics you can never predict which anthem will set you dabbing your eye. You might expect it at Albin’s anguished ‘I am what I am”. Or, since it’s the only big musical-theatre hymn to dutiful parenthood, might empathize in a midlife way with “Look over There”. But in this time of social and planetary dread, my own moment of helpless snivelling was to the credit of Carl Mullanney, in his mumsy mother-of-the-bride suit, swinging into “The Best of Times is now!” . He draws in, one by one, Georges and his embarrassed son, the homophobically hostile in-laws , all the diners and waiters in sight and (well under their breaths) more than a few audience members in Regent’s Park. All for a moment can think yes, this is it: “not some forgotten yesterday, not a future far away…”. Just now right here in the park, hearts singing together, under the trees in the summer dusk.
Magic, it was. We know what to expect from Harvey Fierstein’s defiant 1984 musical (launched, remember, at the start of the AIDS terror) and from Jerry Herman’s songs. We’ll get a celebration of drag : old-style and joyful, drily self-aware without the aggression of current culture-war. We’ll get an affirmation of the gay family in midlife domesticity beneath the glitter . We expect the gently louche humour, a sitcom moment with the visiting bigots, and a great deal of tits-and-tinsel, thrilling frills, high kicks and high camp and the odd drop-dead gag (“there comes a time in every Salome’s life when she should no longer be dropping the last veil”).
Tim Sheader’s swansong as leader of the Open Air Theatre gives us all that, and is glorious. Mullanney is perfect from the first glimpse of him scrubbing a casserole in housewifely dudgeon and a glittering negligee, through the ‘girlish excitement and manly restraint” of the mascara moment, to utter ownership of the cabaret stage, and onward into anxious sacrificial motherliness and resolution. He and Billy Carter’s genuinely touching Georges hold the emotional line of the play perfectly, painfully real in their devotion (Carter’s Song on the Sand is beautiful).
There is real power in that emotional line, as well as the central and excellent joke when, in the beautifully executed scene with young Jean-Paul, Georges and Alban have to come to terms with their son’s straightness (“What have we raised, an animal?”). It’s a perfect mirror image of the way straight society had to accept homosexual partnerships. And sly about the differences of presentation: as Georges says sadly before the Dindons arrive, “My mannerisms can translate into tasteful affections. Yours are..suspicious”. Mullanney’s gallant attempts to look and move like an alpha “Uncle Al” are glorious. But so is the moment when, having mastered living in the prison of hunched slobbish masculinity and followed instructions to act manly, having nobly agreed to “dispense with everything that brings you personal joy”, Albin cannot bear the impersonation, and flees.
But just sit back, banish culture battles, and enjoy. Musically it is lovely, and theatrically particularly masterful: flowing, holding or moving the mood, the scene-changes elegantly achieved by the Cagelles with countless small witty physical asides. The choreography is fabulous, just the right side of silly; the costumes magnificently absurd (o, those spotted-and-striped tights on the peacock dancers) . And if you get a row-end seat you may find an occasional pastel-tulle volcano brush past your very ears, most thrillingly. I also love the offstage collapse of those dancers, sprawling laddishly, ouch-ing their poor feet, abandoning their borrowed she-grace and not pretending anything. A particular sort of guys, but guys all the same. Irresistible.
Everyone’s giving it five, and everyone in the company, and Sheader himself, utterly deserves it. The musical mouse below is for the Cagelles.
openairtheatre.com extended to 23 September
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