Theatre
Grease (Dominion)
Godspell (Barbican Concert Hall)
God-
Sheridan Morley
Joseph and that bloody Technicolor Dreamcoat, followed hotly as it was by Jesus Christ Superstar, has a lot to answer for: indeed it could have been argued, had Rice and Lloyd Webber not progressed to the vastly better Evita, that what they had done was not so much revive the stage musical as kill it stone dead. True, this was not exactly their fault: it just so happened that their first two shows came at the most appalling time for the West End and Broadway musi- cal theatre. Late in the Sixties or early in the Seventies that theatre lost, either by death or retirement, Noel Coward, Lern- er/Loewe and Rodgers/Hammerstein, and a kind of producer-panic set it. The success of Joseph and Jesus seemed to offer an alternative: a kind of God-rock-pop mish- mash, somewhere between a church service and a teenybopping open-air concert, at which nobody would be old enough to care that these shows stood in the same relation to real stage musicals as Sandra Dee did to Peggy Ashcroft among actresses. And producers are a copycat lot: in the wake of Joseph and Jesus came a whole raft of stadium shows like Hair and Grease and Godspell, and the God-awful truth is that 20 years later, just when we thought it was safe to go to a musical again, they're all back or (as in the case of Hair) threatening imminent reappearance.
Moreover, they have now found a new source of supply: whereas the original casts were at least vaguely theatrical (Godspell indeed boasted Jeremy Irons among its first players) the new lot have been almost exclusively recruited from Australian day- time soap operas or breakfast television children's shows, and wander around West End stages looking uneasily as if they might be about to fall through them. If only they would: what is so horrendous about Grease is that it is currently taking more money than any other show in town, despite a score which seems to have been reconditioned from old Pat Boone rejects by a team of manic cheerleaders. A dozen blokes in silver leather jackets leaping cau- tiously off a parked car does not constitute choreography in the Crazy for You sense, nor does an orchestra moving slowly up and down on a stage lift exactly correspond to the Heavyside Layer in Cats.
This is, in short, a production which should be happening in a tent at the Birm- ingham Exhibition Centre for about a week, and before you write to ask me what is wrong with a show which clearly intro- duces thousands of contented theatre-goers to the West End, I will tell you exactly: the fact that they are not theatre-goers at all. They are pop concert-goers who have drift- ed into the Dominion because they saw the film on TV and wish, for some unfath- omable reason, to repeat the experience live. The idea that they or Grease itself will be of any future use to the British or American musical theatre is very nearly as daft as the show's book, which would seem to have been cobbled together in capital letters on the back of a drive-in movie tick- et stub sometime in 1956.
And if you thought that Grease was awful, try Godspell: this one comes back to us at the Barbican Concert Hall with the requisite kiddie-telly presenters, plus Gemma Craven who, as the only legit tal- ent among them, at least has the grace to look deeply embarrassed throughout. Loosely based on the Old Testament, and now given a mindless and pointless rock- concert setting in place of the original pier- rot show, Godspell is a shapeless, aimless, hopeless show which again nobody every bothered to write, and the score of which has been composed for the brain-dead by the lyrically challenged.
Neither Grease nor Godspell is a 'musi- cal' in the sense that Carousel or City of Angels are musicals: they are events, cyni- cally packaged by American producers in the Seventies to try and catch an altogether other audience, one with no knowledge of or respect for the Broadway big-band tradi- tion which was once the proudest boast of the American theatre. They did not belong on stage in the Seventies, and they do not belong there 20 years later. Now ask me if I enjoyed them.
Previous page
