1 AUGUST 1998, Page 45

Theatre

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park) Closer Than Ever (Jermyn Street Theatre) Cabaret (Pizza on the Park) Inventing America (Barbican)

Bury the jewels

Sheridan Morley

The current fashion, in an amazingly musical London summer, for rediscovering 'lost' scores from the Broadway past only really makes sense so long as the show in question genuinely deserves it. But many are better left unrediscovered, and one of those is, I fear, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, newly disinterred for the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park.

Back in 1946, this was already famous as a book and play by Anita Loos, and the musical made a star of the legendary Carol Channing, who went from there to the eternity of Hello Dolly! in an effectively and amazingly two-show career. The 1953 movie gave us Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in a radically rewritten plot and score, but by the time Channing herself tried to put the whole thing back together again for the Broadway stage in 1973 as Lorelei, it was already alarmingly clear that the little girl from little rock had come to the end of her diamond-studded days.

The original 1926 novella by Loos had always been a kind of publishing freak, one of those fragile, magazine-oriented best- sellers which catches a moment but becomes dated almost as soon as it is print- ed, and although the Styne-Robin score has three showstoppers in 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend', 'Little Girl From Little Rock' and 'Bye Bye Baby', they are all it has, while the book and lyrics come a very poor 70th to Sandy Wilson's similarly nos- talgic classic on this side of the Atlantic, The Boyfriend.

The charmingly eccentric Sara Crowe now does all she can with Lorelei in Ian Talbot's brisk staging, but the role needs an over-the-top, charismatic maniac of the Bette Midler variety, while the rest of a large cast are, with the exceptions of Clive Rowe and Debby Bishop, fatally under the illusion that the open air and an old show need nothing more than amateur theatri- cals at their worst. Better to have left the jewels buried.

The American songwriting team of Richard Maltby and David Shire have been together for 30 years on and off-Broadway, though they remain curiously unfamiliar over here largely because their full-stage scores like 'Big' and 'Baby' have never real- ly worked, and Maltby alone has never been given his due for the lyric translations of Miss Saigon.

Their Closer Than Ever (now at Jermyn Street a decade after it first opened in Greenwich Village) is simply a cycle of 24 songs, all self-contained in more ways than one and all dealing with the agonies and the ecstasies of Manhattan life in the Eighties. Someone should maybe have updated the references to Jane Fonda workout videos, but the rest remain topical enough without ever hitting the heights of Sondheim or Kander & Ebb.

The problem is that nearly all these songs have a sameness; they remain a self-regard- ing, bittersweet series of near-identical ego trips with a wry cynicism that ultimately becomes as cloying as all-out sentimentality. A talented, hardworking quartet (Helen Hobson, Beverley Klein, Mark McKer- racher and Gareth Snook) do all they can to bring these short musical stories back to life under Matthew White's suitably urbane, urban-angst staging, but only two (the heartaching post-feminist 'Life Story' and a beautiful 'If I Sing' inspired by Shire's rela- tionship with his own pianist father) are really anything more than all right in an overlong sort of way.

Talking of cabaret, it can (as I know from experience) often take an oddly long time to get different talents truly working on stage with one voice; when the Califor- nian singer Mary Cleere Haran and our own newly knighted Richard Rodney Ben- nett first began to team up at the Pizza on the Park three or four years ago, they seemed an odd and not especially well-suit- ed couple. Now, with a new show about the forgotten women of 1930s Cagney crime pictures, they are just about the best dou- ble-act in town; catch them at the Pizza this week only.

And, finally, when a couple of years ago Adrian Noble announced his RSC decision to pull back from the Barbican to Stratford and the road for at least half of every year, I wrote here that the plan would be disas- trous for the RSC and for London theatre. I now wish to retract half of that prophecy; although I still think the plan has been catastrophic for the RSC, reducing it to something akin to Chichester in the sum- mer-festival regional calendar, the six- monthly departure has done nothing but good to the Barbican itself. When the RSC was always there, moaning about the facili- ties like the ungrateful tenant it was, the Barbican itself was unable to find any real sense of unity or purpose within the building.

But now, under the magnificent new management of John Tusa and Graham Sheffield, this summer's Bite (Barbican International Theatre Event) season has given us, in Inventing America, the first truly co-ordinated happening at the Barbi- can able to use both stages, the cinema, the concert hall and the art gallery in some coherent cross-referenced celebration. The result so far, with another three months to go, has been a masterly selection of Warhol, Gershwin, Steppenwolf, some provocative new American playwriting (including Lisa Kron's 2.5 Minute Ride which linked Nazi concentration camps to America's fascination with theme-park roller-coasters) and much more besides. I for one can't wait for the RSC not to return, if this is how much better it gets in their absence.