A SWELL PARTY, EVENTUALLY
We “Call the Midwife” fans all suspected there was more pizazz to nurse Trixie than bicycling round Poplar in the 1950s, and indeed Helen George always was a dead classy, RAM- trained musical-theatre professional. In the vast dour Barbican hall she’s a golden breeze of a presence, as happy in showy absurdities as in the famous plaintive beauty of “True Love” . A number which, by the way, she delivers not in a boat like Grace Kelly but sprawled with Julian Ovenden’s Dexter on the cold marble floor of the oddly bleak mansion set. But fair enough: Helen George is more of a Marilyn Monroe than an ic-queen Kelly. Her seductiveness is all warm mischief and rueful wit., her acting full of truth: after her magnificent drunken scene with Freddie Fox’s Mike she sings Porter’s fabulous lines about “wrong time, wrong place, wrong face” and there’s a fine, sad stillness there alongside the nonsense.
This is, despite the wonderfulness of any Cole Porter musical, quite the silliest show of musicals’ golden age: Arthur Kopit’s book a featherlight romcom about the Newport yachting rich. Headstrong Tracy on her second wedding-day gradually develops the wit to ditch George the accountant and return to her yacht-obsessed ex Dex, the realization assisted by getting hammered and swimming naked with Mike the gatecrashing reporter. Who, of course, is himself in absurd denial of his love for his photographer Liz (Carly Mercedes Dyer, the other rather fabulous diva of the night). The show’s last big outing was Kevin Spacey’s last hurrah at the old Vic ten years ago under Maria Friedman, and I remember that as really being a swell party, revelling in the screwball-comedy gags and hurling everything at the big numbers.
So I was a bit worried in the first half at how primly straight this felt, sometimes the characters looking dwarfed by the great looming mansion set and only sporadic moments of fine energy. Notably Freddie and Liz doing Who Wants to be a Millionaire around the great gifts-table get things moving for a few minutes, and, finally Nigel Lindsay’s Uncle Willie leads Now You Have Jazz with a proper big wild chorus moment. Overall, though, the first half has a weird lack of atmosphere despite a fine cast, somehow flattening even the best of the screwball-comedy gags (“women like that bore the pants off me” “So that’s how it’s done!”).
It brightens wonderfully in the second half, from the moment Mike and Dexter let rip with “Did you Evah!” (Freddie Fox, physically witty and airily tuneful, must do more musicals. Soon. Please!). It picks up pace, thundering and dancing through the Cole Porter songbook as they all get drunker, giving the big Let’s Misbehave number a wilder, rougher energy and, vitally, letting Fox’s comic talent and Helen George’s subtle, mischievous, honest characterization shine through all the nonsense. It’s as if the whole show suddenly got younger after feeling creakingly middle-aged for the first hour. What a relief.
Tracy’s priceless “aren’t men great!”is a classic moment to take home, and so is a nice sour reprise of Millionaire by the weary domestic staff. Felicity Kendall meanwhile deploys all her growly-pussycat national-treasuredom as she completes her marital reconciliation with a mournful, tuneful Malcolm Sinclair as Seth,. And poor George – David Seadon Young bravely playing that patron saint of geeks – leaves the stage . With an authorly contempt which usefully reminds you how brutal those old golden-age musical conventions were: any modern romcom author would have chucked the poor sap a consolation-prize romance with one of the housemaids.
barbican.org.uk to 11 July
Rating 4
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