Theatre
Chicago (Ade1phi) Mutabilitie (National) Bugsy Malone (Queens)
Circus trickery
Sheridan Morley
An obsessive lover of the Broadway musical in general and those of Kander & Ebb in particular, why do I now find myself the only critic in London underwhelmed by the current revival of Chicago at the Adel- phi? No musical of recent times, not even those of Lloyd Webber or Cameron Mack- intosh, has been more expertly or carefully Pre-sold, and there is no doubt that the show will be halfway down the Strand for at the very least the next two years. We know, of course, that the production comes from the last Broadway season, where it collect- ed several Tony awards; what we are not told so often, however, is that it began not on the Great White Way but as a one- weekend-only concert staging, similar to our 'Lost Musicals' seasons at the Barbican.
As a result, there is very little here by way of scenery or costumes; a giant band- stand dominates the stage, while all the act- ing and dancing has to be done around it in surprisingly constricted spaces. The original show has thus been cut back, by its director Walter Bobbie, to its very barest essentials, and in fact we might as well be witnessing it at the Barbican concert or the Royal Festi- val Hall, so limited is the acting area now available at the Ade1phi. The other prob- lem, it seems to me, is the passionate rever- ence for the late Bob Fosse evidenced by the choreographer Ann Reinking, once his wife, so that the knees and elbows are everywhere; I have always believed that a little Fosse goes a very long way, and here It goes all through the show and then around the back of the orchestra and around again, just in case for a split-second we should forget the style of the original Creator. As I have always believed of Agnes de Mille, allowing even a genius choreogra- pher to dominate a show is rather like giv- ing the whole thing over to the senior lighting man.
So what of Chicago itself? Dating from 1975 as a musical, it in fact goes back to the early 1930s as first a play and then a Gin- ger Rogers movie called Roxie Hart, which told of a publicity-seeking dancer on trial for murder and determined to bring her showbiz talents into the witness box. God has certainly been good to the current Ade1phi producers, delivering them not just O.J. Simpson but also the more recent Boston au-pair trial to prove that in Ameri- ca jazz and justice, showbiz and show trials are never far apart; I still think the clue to the whole enterprise lies in a lyric from the big 'Razzle Dazzle' number which goes `Long as you keep 'em way off balance/ How can they spot you got no talents?'
Chicago has always been sleight of hand, a massive circus trick which happens so fast and so noisily that you forget to notice that there isn't really anyone up there on the high wire after all. There is certainly a good basic idea here, to show that Chicago in the Twenties got the gangsters it deserved, and that if you treat Capone or Pretty Boy Floyd as media stars, then you might as well set their murders in a showbiz circus. The result is a Death Row vaudeville, full of great big-band solos and duets and the occasional crackling dialogue: 'We broke up because of artistic differences — he saw himself as alive whereas I saw him as dead.'
But there are only so many times that you can stop a show that never really gets started, and Chicago suffers from divided loyalties, trapped between the rival tradi- tions of Cagney-Bogart on the one hand and Busby Berkeley on the other. The new production is certainly shorter and sharper than the originals on either side of the Atlantic, but instead of a musical play we now have a dance festival. Ute Lemper in her London legit debut is just wonderful, bringing precisely the right edge of Brecht/ Weill to a Berlin-influenced score, while Nigel Planer perfectly captures the heart- break of Mr Cellophane. The rest of the casting is patchier, but Ruthie Henshall and Henry Goodman certainly do not lack presence; I just wish that bloody bandstand were on a trap and could occasionally be lowered to let them get on with the non- musical action.
On the National's Cottesloe stage, Frank McGuinness's Mutabilitie is a grave disap- pointment, all the more since it is Trevor Nunn's debut production as director there; Richard Eyre must have left him very little else in. the hand-over cupboard. Set in the Ireland of 1598, this is a seriously weird and hopelessly portentous piece in which Shakespeare and Spenser slug it out among the bogs with a couple of strolling players out of Stoppard and a seriously dysfunc- tional family of Irish warlords led by Gawn Grainger in a mad parody of the Brian Cox King Lear. Nothing here makes a lot of sense, though as the mist occasionally clears it seems that McGuinness wishes us to consider issues of identity and nation- hood which have haunted his native land these last 400 years; did I not know better, I would have been inclined to assume that this was the winner in a student playwriting competition or more possibly the runner- up, awarded points for nobility of intention rather than stagecraft. Patrick Malahide as Spenser and Anton Lesser as Shakespeare do their best to flesh out an imaginary meeting of the bards, and fail as dismally as the rest of an amazingly ill-conceived evening.
And, finally, to the Queens the National Youth Music Theatre have brought for Christmas a first-ever staging of Bugsy Mal- one, the old Alan Parker film about the kids and the splatter-guns; the curious thing here is that the company are really much better when stretched toward adult roles, as in their recent Whistle Down the Wind, than when playing and singing within their own age range. Either that, or else Bugsy never did have much more going for it than the one joke about kiddie Capones; whichever way, Paul Williams's score has not stood the test of a fairly brief time.
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