THE BICYCLE MEN
King's
Head Theatre, London N1
Opened 8 November, 2007
**
Sometimes you can see the cleverness in a show's creation, the skill in
its execution, and yet it just doesn't do a thing for you. In the past
five years The Bicycle Men
has been well received in Los Angeles, Chicago and on the New York and
Edinburgh Fringes. Its four creators and performers have long and
substantial records in American comedy, and are clearly no idiots. The
staging has a cheap 'n' cheerful look without being shoddy. It contains
a number of fine moments, such as a lullaby in which Dan Castellaneta
(replacing co-writer Dave Lewman) croons to baby that there is no God
or afterlife and the world is a dreadful place, or the point at which
Joe Liss's mute buffoon completes his Marx Brothers pastiche by playing
the spokes of a bicycle wheel as if they were a harp. But I'm afraid my
enthusiasm needle barely flickered.
This gauzy tale of an American traveller stranded in a small French
town when his bicycle crashes just feels gratuitous – not in the sense
of excessive, but merely having no particular reason for existing. Why
does a musical set in France include parodies of Gilbert &
Sullivan, Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis, all-purpose Latin music and a
number about white guys at a fish fry in the 'hood? The answer, I
suspect, is that musician Mark Nutter and his comrades came up with the
numbers and then looked for a way to string them together; hence the
show meanders around many different settings in its 100 minutes without
amassing more plot than can be recounted in ten seconds. Why has an
interval been added since the programmes were printed? In an effort to
make it feel less insubstantial. Why are cuts between scenes punctuated
by physical-theatre parodies as the team throw chairs around in dim
lighting? Er, pass. Castellaneta rightly declines to play on his
status, but without the programme biography one would never believe
that this man is a colossus of world culture, supplying as he does the
voice of Homer in The Simpsons.
That show is admired for its tightness and detail, whereas this one has
all the structural bagginess of devised affairs at their worst. I'm
afraid the final verdict has to be "D'oh!"
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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