A FRESH CAST, ONE YEAR ON
Can it really be a whole year since, with theatre still gallantly recovering from Covid, Nicholas Hytner rolled the dice and opted to offer us some razzle dazzle? This glorious revival of the classic Loesser-Swerling-Burrows musical of Damon Runyan roguery turned his playhouse into an escape hatch into 1940’s New York. Hordes of promenaders have been shepherded night after night between rising and falling scenes and streets by amiable stage crew dressed as cops, while trilbied lowlifes and furred and spangled women capered between and overhead, and the missioners’ drum marched through them exhorting the gamblers to sin no more.
Above it all those of us in the galleries have watched with equal if less strenous joy and a good few come back again and again, noticing something new in Bunny Christie’s remarkable set every time: an artfully unnoticeable arrival of new street furniture, the suddenness of the switch to Cuba. Or it might be just a fresh gasp at the close ensemble drilling and sheer night-vision determination which enables the setting up and populating of a whole missionhall full of neatly arrnaged and occupied chairs , achieved during a blackout too brief to notice as a chord from the band fades.
Nobody has been surprised at its run extending: the show is a treasure, a blast, a night of crazy funny musical romance with defiant transgressiveness and real heart in two sets of wayward lovers. Nobody has been the least surprised that it ran on and on. It’s deserved it: the production nimble to the edge of acrobatic, fast-moving, witty and full of nerve and fun.
This week saw the formal launch of the latest new cast, and it is good to see that heart intact, and the important chemistry still there. As Sarah the missionary Celinde Schoemaker is glorious: quite apart from the lyrical beauty of her voice she proves to be a fearless and agile comedienne, swercing from righteousness into bacchanal revelry and a breatakingly choreograohed brawl after she discovers Bacardi in Havana. Timmika Ramsay’s Miss Adelaide is an equal joy, pneumatically irresistible in her big numbers and enchantingly plaintive as she pores over her new psychology book about frustrated singleness. The new Nathan Detroit is Owain Arthur, making it is own as a solid, hapless semi-competent wheele-dealer: George Ioannides as Sky Masterson is the smoothest lounge lizard to be found under any hat, but cracks into reformed virtue with boyish conviction. And speak with reverence of Harry the Horse – Dashaun Vegas – hitting his big Siddown number like a runaway truck.
It matters that the principals are again excellent and well cast, but what matters more a year on is that it is such a gloriously achieved ensemble show (and that includes the stage crew). You don’t need to be a theatre economist to suspect that its warm brilliance and deliberate joy , culminating in a party atmosphere between promenaders and cast at the final curtain, must have gone far to save this still-new theatre from the chilly financial wind.
But almost as importantly, it has been in the capital – and among those who visit it – a powerful and reassuring affirmation of audience morale. Nobody who has spun out happily onto the riverbank singing and laughing can maintain or endorse postCovid timidity about sharing delight , breathing together, with crowds of strangers. It’s a public service. It’s still here. Till August, anyway. Lucky London, brave bright Bridge.
bridgetheatre.co.uk. to 24 August
Rating … unchanged… all the fives there are.
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