Theatre
Ferry Cross the Mersey (Lyric) Dial M for Murder (Apollo) On the Twentieth Century (Bridewell)
Summer specials
Sheridan Morley
With London baking into the nineties and most of my colleagues safely north of the border awaiting the next technical dis- aster at an unusually accident-prone Edin- burgh Festival, the impresario Bill Kenwright has intelligently taken Shaftes- bury Avenue and turned it into a kind of seaside repertory circuit.
At the Lyric we have yet another of his singalong songbooks, this one devoted to the infinitely amiable Gerry Marsden: Feny Cross the Mersey has a distinct advantage over such similar celebrations as Buddy, Jolson and Elvis in that it can still deliver its star stage centre. Mr Marsden and his Pacemakers may have lost a little of their early 1960s verve but Gerry himself drifts amiably through a selection of his hit, plus a few equally gentle borrowings from the more accessible highlights to the Beatles and Presley catalogues.
We late teenagers of the early Sixties who couldn't bear the gloomy pretension of the Beatles, nor the bland inanities of Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele and Cilia Black, duly finished up at Marsden's door: he was middle-of-the-road, mid-Atlantic and a sort of all-purpose Liverpool com- promise. Thirty years later there he still is, massacring 'You'll Never Walk Alone' while his equally ageing audience wave their arms about in recognition of a time when football was not always equated with hooligans or stadiums collapsing. Feny Cross the Mersey is a wonderfully nostalgic treat: Marsden now even wears a hearing aid, whether as a prompt for his own some- what inane lyrics or because of the ravages of late middle age we shall never know. But his show is shot through with a cheery dis- missal of Sixties rock legends (`as a drum- mer few could touch him, and as a human few would ever have wanted to') and for just that reason it's the most joyously cyni- cal show in town.
Next door at the Apollo, and in the best traditions of Frinton Repertory circa 1959, Kenwright has a revival of that old pre- Sleuth thriller Dial M for Murder, creaking
along to its famous climax (will the killer find the key under the carpet? Who, in Edmund White's famous phrase, cares who killed Roger Ayckroyd?), with a cast who manage commendably to keep straight faces throughout, one of which is the gor- geous Katie Rabett's; the rest of them might care for anonymity.
And the best till last: at the Bridewell, a brilliant revival of Broadway's On the Twentieth Century, a musical never without its problems but here brought back to splendid small-scale life with Michael Har- bour and Kathryn Evans in the roles creat- ed on screen by John Barrymore and Carole Lombard: hasten along.
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