Teeth ’ n’ Smiles is not quite a musical. David Hare’s 1975 play about rock’n’roll includes a handful of tunes performed by a group of failing musicians. It feels like several dramas rammed together. One strand concerns the aimless witter of instrumentalists who lounge around backstage discussing drugs and groupies. Another strand follows the lead singer, Maggie, and her destructive appetites for booze and casual sex.
The third element concerns the band’s manager, Saraffian (Phil Daniels), who knows nothing about showbusiness and seems keen to advertise his ignorance to the world. Saraffian is a Dickensian figure who talks like Fagin and believes that pop stars should resemble school prefects. The play is set in 1969 and yet he declares that English music reached its zenith in 1956. He hasn’t heard of the Beatles, apparently.
James Stokes delivers a breathtaking range of subtle and painterly effects
His role in the drama is to deal with the troublesome Maggie by forcing her to leave the band even though she’s their finest asset. And here she comes. Staggering out of her dressing room, Maggie gives a drunken interview to a student journalist in which she showcases her latest soundbite. ‘America is a crippled giant,’ she slurs. ‘England is a sick gnome.’ Not a bad quote. She seduces the interviewer and, after making a few coarse remarks about his sexual incapacity, she launches into a riotous performance on stage. She attacks her own pianist, sets fire to the venue and gets busted for possession of drugs. What a star. A dazzling career as a wild child awaits her. And yet the halfwits in the band can’t see that Maggie’s crazy behaviour will generate free publicity and propel their music up the charts. Saraffian doesn’t grasp this either.
A fourth strand of the play emerges when Maggie’s mopey ex-boyfriend shows up and attempts to revive their affair, even though he’s engaged to someone else.
The play falls apart in the second act as Maggie gets increasingly depressed and Saraffian delivers a series of meandering speeches about cocktail bars in Piccadilly during the war. And he introduces the band to his latest prodigy, a teenage Elvis clone named ‘Randolph’ who wears a trim blue suit and a ginger quiff. Why does Saraffian know so little about the industry in which he works? Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) plays Maggie perfectly well as a prattling narcissistic nuisance but it’s a role that demands little depth or subtlety. She supplements the show with a solo ballad, ‘Maggie’s Song’, which has a beguiling innocence and purity. It could be a hit.
Kinky Boots is a training programme presented as a song-and-dance production. Its purpose is to teach unenlightened men how to treat drag queens with the respect they deserve. The story is set in Northampton where Charlie Price, a charmless angry bigot, inherits a failing shoe factory from his moronic father. Bankruptcy looms. Charlie meets a cross-dressing bodybuilder named ‘Lola’ who offers to design a range of crimson lace-up boots that drag queens love to buy. Demand for this kind of footwear is so vast, according to Lola, that Charlie’s factory is bound to prosper. But Charlie treats Lola discourteously and keeps describing him as a ‘lady-dick’ or a ‘transvestite’ which makes poor Lola pull a face like a scandalised nun. Charlie is ordered to ‘treat everyone as they are’ and he finally learns his lesson when Lola flounces out of the factory. Charlie suffers a meltdown and makes a grovelling apology over the phone. ‘Every time you leave a room,’ he sobs, ‘there’s a great gaping gap.’
This is the central friendship of the show but it’s hard to care about either character because their connection is driven by need not love. Charlie is desperate for a talented designer and Lola loves to scold Charlie whenever he uses an incorrect form of address or drops a cutting remark about Lola’s collection of spangly dresses and scarlet tutus. Both are tiresome, threadbare personalities.
The music by Cyndi Lauper is forgettably humdrum apart from an epic ballad, ‘The History Of Wrong Guys’, belted out by Lauren (Courtney Bowman) just before the interval. This is a wildly expensive production directed by Nikolai Foster who has picked a BBC favourite, Johannes Radebe, to play Lola. Radebe dances beautifully and he has plenty of charisma but his voice is underpowered. He drifts in and out of the action like a visiting dignitary rather than a proper thesp and he delivers his lines half-heartedly as if he’s uncertain whether he wants to join in or not. And why use such a salty South African accent? Lola, as we’re told many times, comes from Clacton.
The show’s best feature is the lighting design by James Stokes, who delivers a breathtaking range of subtle and painterly effects. And his work on the big catwalk numbers is magnificent. A masterclass.
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