Musicals

The Last Ship, a musical written by and featuring Sting, is touring Europe, Australia and America. The show is a class-war parable set in Newcastle during the 1980s. A team of shipbuilders are about to complete a new vessel, the Utopia, when a bossy government minister, Baroness Tynedale, arrives at the docks to deliver bad news. With her bright- blue suit and posh hectoring voice, she’s a pantomime Mrs Thatcher and she announces that the yard will be seized and flogged to private investors. The shipbuilders establish a Marxist committee and plot to overturn her evil scheme. A gripping start. Plucky Geordies pitted against yuppie scavengers from London. The show even features a song about the competing merits of collectivism and monetarism. Then it all implodes.

Plenty of critics have mocked Trainspotting – the musical (with lyrics and music by Irvine Welsh and Stephen McGuinness, respectively) but the producers know their audience’s mind. They want to see live theatre without taking the risk of a new play, which might be gruesome, and they prefer a dead-safe replica of a glamorous movie to something by Chekhov or Pinter. Reviewers admire novelty and inventiveness so they tend to punish theatre-makers who reheat leftovers. The show follows the book more closely than the film, where Renton was the central figure, and here he blends in with the community of wasters and criminals who mope around Edinburgh trying to raise cash for smack. The characters are reduced to simplistic gestures, as easy to read as hand signals. Begbie is a cocky thug.

If you’re interested in how words work with music, the collected lyrics of Stephen Sondheim are an investment you’ll never regret. But Sondheim isn’t infallible, and when he writes about his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II he’s often plain wrong. Sondheim mocks one particular lyric from The Sound of Music: ‘Like a lark that is learning to pray.’ ‘Wait a minute – a lark praying?’ he snarks. But the character who sings those words is a devout young Austrian woman with a head full of Schubert and folksongs. Hammerstein is writing as Maria, not himself. It’s an art that Sondheim never quite mastered, which is why his characters – whether Swedish aristocrats or East End cannibals – all sound like New Yorkers in therapy.

Sinatra: The Musical dramatises the star’s career during a minor wobble in the early 1950s. After falling from grace, Sinatra stages a comeback and becomes an Oscar-winning film actor. Joe DiPietro’s script gives the impression that Sinatra’s world is ruled by wise, powerful and well-connected women. Billie Holiday teaches him how to sing with feeling: ‘Bend the notes at the end of the phrases.’ His mother explains the secret of a happy marriage: ‘One talks, the other doesn’t.’ When Sinatra punches and injures a photographer, his wife tries to restore his image by ordering him to play a priest in The Miracle of the Bells. Sinatra obeys. The film bombs so badly that his press agent, George, severs all contact with him.

Bertolt Brecht’s classic, Mother Courage, is about a female war profiteer who drags a wagon of supplies through no man’s land and sells them to bedraggled soldiers. During the story, she loses both her children and she discovers that war is not as marvellous as she previously thought. This spiritual journey evidently mattered to Brecht, who was born in 1898 in Augsburg, and who greeted the outbreak of the first world war with enthusiasm only to become disillusioned by the mechanised slaughter of the trenches. His play is aimed at wrong-headed militaristic numbskulls who believe that war is good rather than bad. If you already hold pacifist views, you may find his tutorial a little simplistic.

End of the Rainbow feels like a prison drama set in London in 1969. Judy Garland is about to give a string of solo shows in the West End and she’s preparing at the Ritz under the supervision of her cruel boyfriend, Mickey Deans, who doubles as her publicist and drug dealer. Her British pianist, a friendly queen named Anthony, tries to protect her from Mickey’s manipulative bullying. Judy, the captive, forfeits our sympathy straight away by complaining about everything. Her suite is too poky. She’s desperate for liquor to improve her mood. And she reacts with outrage when the Ritz manager asks for payment in advance so she forces him to back down by threatening to commit suicide. She rehearses the stunt by standing on a balcony and daring herself to dive into the street.

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.

Cable Street is a musical that premièred last year at the Southwark Playhouse and has now migrated to the Marylebone Theatre. Fans of beautiful staging will be instantly smitten by the amazing achievement of the designer, Yoav Segal. The script by Tim Gilvin and Adam Kanefsky tells the story of a violent stand-off in October 1936 between cockney activists and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The authors treat the East End during the depression as a panto or a moral fairy tale. It’s good vs evil. The socialists are hard-working, golden-hearted heroes who rise up against the wicked landlords and their cruel rent hikes. The fascists are angry, misshapen losers led by a waddling baldie in a stick-on moustache. The socioeconomic background is hard to decipher.

Who doesn’t love Paddington? The winsome marmalade junkie has arrived at the Savoy Theatre in a musical version of the 2014 movie. First of all, the show is sensational. Absolute box-office gold, full of joy, mirth and spectacle. It’s also quite pricey but never mind. Sceptics who feel indifferent to children’s fiction will be relieved to learn that the dyspraxic Peruvian asylum seeker doesn’t feature much in the story. Paddington’s main attribute is his physical clumsiness and once he succeeds in destroying the crockery and furniture at the Browns’ family home, he runs out of narrative possibilities. His fur is invitingly combustible. Could someone set him on fire? Not quite.

Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty has been turned into a stage show directed by Michael Grandage. We’re in the early 1980s and Nick has just left Oxford with a literature degree. He lodges with his wealthy friend, Toby Fedden, in their family home and he offers to keep an eye on Toby’s troubled sister, Cat, who suffers from depression. Despite her disorder, Cat is a rebellious type who quizzes Nick about the intimate details of his casual flings with men. Her father, Gerald, wins a safe Tory seat and persuades Mrs Thatcher to attend a ball at their mansion in the country. The prime minister’s arrival throws the Feddens into a panic but Nick saves the day by smoothly asking Mrs Thatcher for a dance. ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I would like that very much.

The village of Brigadoon rises from the Scotch mists once every 100 years, and revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical are only slightly more frequent. The last major London production closed in 1989; and if you know Brigadoon at all it’s probably through the lush 1954 movie. The new staging at Regent’s Park takes a very different approach. The songs, the basic story and the heather (lots of it, pink and looking only slightly artificial) are all still there, but the director Rona Munro has rewritten the book, backdating the action to the second world war and turning Lerner and Loewe’s American tourists into a pair of shot-down bomber pilots. The music swings, the park supplies the scenery and the downpour only added to the fun It's a bold stroke, and it pays off.

Inter Alia, a new play from the creators of Prima Facie, follows the hectic double life of Jess, a crown court judge, played by Rosamund Pike. As a high-flying lawyer with a family to care for, she knows that ‘having it all’ means ‘doing it all’. When not in court, she skivvies non-stop for her indolent husband and her useless son, who telephones her at work to ask why his Hawaiian shirt isn’t in the fridge where he left it. She races home, finds the shirt, irons it back and front, and then starts to prepare supper for eight guests. Husband and son pretend to help by Frisbeeing the dinner plates around the kitchen and tossing pots of taramasalata to each other. A spillage of gunk lands on the kitchen floor and Jess promptly kneels down and wipes it clean.

Cher Horowitz, the central character in Clueless, is one of the most irritating heroines in the history of movies. She’s a rich, slim, beautiful Beverly Hills princess obsessed with parties, boys and clothing brands. According to her, the world’s problems can easily be settled by using the solutions she applied to the seating plan at her dad’s birthday dinner. But Cher is also a creation of genius because she draws us into her life and makes us understand the raw, damaged reality that lies behind her superficial perfection. She’s not a privileged brat. She’s all of us. At the start of this musical remake, Cher takes us on a tour of her luxury home. ‘The Greek columns date all the way back to 1975,’ she says.

Punk rock, packaged, parcelled, and boxed up as a treat for nostalgic wrinklies. That’s the deal with Punk Off!, a touring show that recently completed a lap of the country at the Dominion Theatre. Most of the audience were there to recall their rebellious heyday. ‘It’s about to get really, really loud,’ announced the compère, Kevin Kennedy, as the four-piece band hammered out ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’ ‘and ‘If the Kids Are United’. Both hits sounded eerily unfamiliar. Why? Those raucous, pulsing rhythms can’t be turned into elevator jingles or a background drone at a shopping mall – so we rarely hear them. Just as well. Kennedy rattled through the major turning points in the movement’s history.

Oliver! directed by Matthew Bourne is billed as a ‘fully reconceived’ version of Lionel Bart’s musical. Very little seems to have been reconceived. This stylish and dynamic show develops like an unblemished copy of Carol Reed’s film. Fair enough. Punters want comfort, not novelty when they go to see a 65-year-old musical. Billy Jenkins, as the Artful Dodger, captures every heart in the auditorium. But of course he does. It’s no slur on Jenkins to point out that the ‘Dodger’ is one of the greatest acting gigs in all musical theatre. Has it ever been done badly? The Oliver I saw, Raphael Korniets (one of three sharing the role), is a slender youngster with a huge singing voice.