Theatre
Singin' in the Rain (National) Speaking in Tongues (Hampstead)
A Busy Day (Lyric)
Let it rain . . .
Sheridan Morley
Should the National Theatre be hosting a West Yorkshire Playhouse staging of a 50-year-old Hollywood movie? Probably not, especially in a season when it is already running The Heiress and is about to announce Noises Off and My Fair Lady and a new Ayckbourn for the winter season unless of course it really does intend to become a lethally subsidised combination of the Haymarket and the Palladium, in which case those few surviving West End commercial managements may as well pack up forever in the face of unfair and unbeat- able competition.
Am I shamefully delighted nonetheless to have seen it? Yes, I am. This is not the Singin' in the Rain travesty in which Tommy Steele trekked round the country 15 or so years ago, one which bore remarkably little relation to the classic Adolph Green-Betty Comden screenplay and batched in all kinds of songs from elsewhere. Instead, it's an utterly faithful return to the original 1952 movie and, although, alas, we don't get Gene Kelly or Debbie Reynolds or Donald O'Connor, we do get a largely unknown cast in some breathtaking chore- ography by Stephen Mear, who is the real star of this production. Unusually for a British musical, it is dance-led, with some of the best tap routines I have ever seen this side of the Atlantic.
Jude Kelly's staging manages to com- ment on the original movie even while cel- ebrating it; some brilliant screen graphics, together with a couple of downpours of real rain, neatly bring the old satire about the coming of talking pictures to stage life. Comden & Green's vintage script survives intact with some of the greatest lines in all `Tessa Jowell wants the skinny model gene censored.' screen musicals — 'I'm richer than Calvin Coolidge put together'; 'You couldn't even read the Gettysburg Address'; 'So who cares anyway where Gettysburg lived?'. As for the songs, any score with 'Fit As A Fid- dle' and 'Make 'Em Laugh' and 'All I Do' and 'Lucky Star', not to mention the `Moses Supposes', a clear forerunner of My Fair Lady's 'Rain In Spain', has to be counted among the all-time classics.
True, a curtain call for the entire cast in translucent white plastic macs makes it look as though a convention of dentists in Nebraska has decided to do the hospital pantomime right here, but that is a rare lapse of taste and judgment; elsewhere, Stuart Pedlar has done an amazing, revi- sionist restoration job on the orchestrations and, though you occasionally wonder why a 90-minute movie now takes all of three hours to stage, these are minor complaints about a major hit. Rebecca Thornhill, Zoe Hart, Mark Channon and Paul Robinson are all here making their names in their first major London musical roles; they all still have a lot to learn about the charisma of stardom, but precious little about danc- ing or singing or the near-lost art of a comic routine. As a summer lollipop for the tourist trade, the Rain is (as far as I am concerned) welcome to pelt down in buck- etloads for months.
But there are other issues here: I have never accepted the still widespread critical theory that a major subsidised company should not stage great musicals the way it stages great Shakespeare or great Ibsen. I have always believed that the RSC/ Cameron Mackintosh Les Miserables is as great a stage achievement as any in the last century. But I do think that there has to be a distinction: for a subsidised company to be doing a musical, it needs to be either long-lost, or a major rethink, or the kind of revival which could not be done commer- cially. Singin' in the Rain is in this context borderline; the staging is sometimes pedes- trian, but the musical is never going to be a classic; it is what it always was, a collection of randomly disparate Freed/Brown songs from the Twenties and Thirties brilliantly given a linking plot by two of the greatest librettists in the history of show business. If for no other reason, the production is wel- come for giving us at last the chance to cel- ebrate Comden & Green.
Where possible, the new production also manages to comment on the movie, which itself commented on the coming of sound; but we are now at three removes and more than seven decades from the inspiration, and a certain fatigue sets in at that dis- tance. Ask yourself whether, at the Nation- al Theatre, you would want to see a really good staging of the Broadway Melody of 1934, and you begin to see the problem.
There is a kind of triumph here, but also, at least to me, a dangerous falling off in entry requirements on the South Bank; National scripts still need to have their visas more carefully checked than this. All of which leaves me space only to note that, at Hampstead, Speaking in Tongues is yet another reminder of how we ignore the Australian theatre at our peril; part thriller, part commentary on what happens to lone- some lives in vast open spaces, Andrew Bovell's is a fascinating, chilling lament for a lost continent.
Meanwhile at the Lyric, A Busy Day is Fanny Burney's long-lost attempt to bridge the gap from Richard Brinsley Sheridan (who originally commissioned it exactly two centuries ago) to Oscar Wilde and although the bridge collapses all too fast, both Sarah Crowe and Stephanie Beacham give cascadingly funny performances in Jonathan Church's agile staging.
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