Theatre
The Witches of Eastwick (Drury Lane)
Three cheers
Sheridan Morley
Who really knows anything about new musicals? When Oklahoma! opened on the road in 1943, a Boston critic thought it had `no gags, no girls, no chance'; when Lerner and Loewe played Mary Martin their score for My Fair Lady, her only comment was `You poor dears have lost all your talent'; Noel Coward, not exactly a newcomer to the musicals business, turned down leading roles in both My Fair Lady and The King and I; and more recently most London crit- ics underestimated the run of Les Mis- erabks by about 15 years.
So what do we know about The Witches of Eastwick at Drury Lane? First, it is that real and precious rarity, a musical comedy; we haven't seen one of those in the West End for about a decade, since City of Angels in fact, and to find one actually cre- ated over here you would have to go back another decade to Windy City, a brilliant but commercially disastrous musical of Hecht & MacArthur's The Front Page.
For that reason alone, we should already be cheering these Witches. Why else? For a start, or rather a first-act finale, there's the flying; not just up and down as in the old Peter Pan, but way out into the auditorium, and achieved not by a network railway on the roof of the Lane, but by a revolution- ary, new, locally invented system involving a series of interlinked winches.
Then again there's the casting: as the witches, there are Maria Friedman and Joanna Riding (arguably the two greatest British music-theatre talents of their sex and generation) and from Broadway Lucie Arnaz, who has learnt a thing or two about being a funny and yet also dazzling leading lady in musicals from her mother, Lucille Ball, one of the very few others in that curi- ously tricky line of showbusiness. As the randy devil who erupts into their small-town lives, Ian McShane returns to the West End after 30 years, joining that very select group of British stage actors (Rex Harrison, David Tomlinson, Paul Scofield, Jonathan Pryce, Warren Mitchell) who discovered, often in mid-career, that they could sing and dance a little.
True, having decided to play the devil as Hugh Hefner, complete with his own Play- devil mansion, there is not a lot more that he can do with a somewhat underwritten role. With McShane, what you first see is what you get for the next couple of hours, but he has an admirable energy level and a useful line in old-fashioned stardom. He has also learnt the invaluable trick of having other people dance around him, rather than having to prance uneasily around them. And the good news goes on: in one of the best-written roles, that of the manic leader of the Eastwick townspeople, Rose- mary Ashe finally comes into her own brand of musical stardom as the English Ethel Merman she has always been in cabaret. Then there's the score, and what is remarkable here is the way in which its writ- ers, John Dempsey (book and lyrics) and Dana Rowe (music), seem to be auditioning songs from the whole history of the Ameri- can musical. You want something good and cynical enough for Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle? Try 'I Love A Little Town'; you want an 11 o'clock number from the vintage Broadway 1950s? Try 'Look At Me'; you want an echo of Bye Bye Birdie? Try 'Dirty Laundry'. You want a second-half show- stopper? Try 'Another Night At Darryl's' or `Dance With The Devil'.
True, we're by now a long way away from the original John Updike novel, but then so too was the Jack Nicholson film; the magi- cal attraction of this project is that, unlike more familiar or simplistic material, The Witches of Eastwick can be adapted into just about anything you want. What I think Dempsey and Rowe want, apart from demonstrating their breathtaking versatility and nostalgia for the golden years of Broad- way, is to rewrite Our Town in acid and blood and tears. Eastwick therefore becomes the reverse of Stepford, a town where the all-American wives, instead of robotic docility, opt for lethal revenge on any men unwise enough to have married them. Even the devil eventually gets annihi- lated by their curses, in a spectacular church conflagration which ends with the funniest line in the show, when a mute dwarf (don't ask) stares at the sacred flames for a while before murmuring 'Right, then' and heading off to find some altogether other and hopefully less devilish employer. All we have hitherto heard from Dempsey and Rowe in London is The Fix, a savage little musical about a blood-suck- ing White House family inventing the word clYsfunctional; this time the writers come back at us from all corners of the stage with every kind of song, and all given a lethal vodka twist. Love songs stop abrupt- ly, or change into hymns of hate in mid- bar; nothing is quite what it seems, and in that at least they are faithful followers of Updike. He too, of course, is famously one of the great American satirists of our time, and it is that sense of satire, of the Ameri- can dream becoming a nightmare even before we fall asleep, that gives this score its much-needed unity. Even the dance numbers are wicked parodies of all those endless Agnes de Mile dream ballets from the 1940s.
The echoes here are also of Wizard of Oz, complete with a tough little Dorothy who acts as a kind of weird narrator, ever eager to point out to anyone who will listen that Chicken Little may have been right about the sky falling in at any moment. Bob Crowley's witty, cut-out sets, the orchestrations of David Caddick and William Brohn, the choreography of Bob Avian and Stephen Mear, all veteran tech- nicians of other Mackintosh musicals, sur- round the newcomers here with an expertise which they would ironically no longer find on the Broadway from which they derive their art.
But any musical comedy in which witches can fill a neighbour's mouth with eyes of newt, and add the Shakespearean reference just in the nick of time, has to be some- thing out of the ordinary; the final genius lies in the recognition that these three witches are not only the weird sisters in Macbeth, they are also the ugly sisters in Cinderella, except of course that they aren't ugly at all, but funny and touching and sometimes even heartbreaking.
This is, in every possible sense, a truly magical show, written, composed, chore- ographed, designed and directed to within inches of perfection by an amazing team of backstage and on-stage talent. It is also in my view the most unmistakably produced musical I have ever seen; every element of Witches of Eastwick is about what Cameron Mackintosh has learnt in almost 30 years of producing wide-stage epics. This lyrical, wistful, jokey, melodic, cynical, celebratory, constantly referential but never reverential new score manages to salute or satirise almost every major musical of the last 50 years, while looking ahead to the way shows like this, not that there are any others yet, ought to develop in the next half-century or so. If you want it in a single word, that word is expert. The Witches of Eastwick is the musical that starts the 21st century, and it will already be a hard act to follow.
'So what are you out for?'
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