On this same stage four years ago, Michael Ball transformed himself utterly in the title role of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. This time, as silent movie-making giant Mack Sennett, we first hear the baritone icon of British musical theatre bellowing from offstage. It’s a very un-Ball voice, but within seconds of showing us his face he reverts to more familiar Ball mode: Sennett’s bitterest lines are accompanied by disarming flashes of wide eyes and bounces of the eyebrows, as if Ball felt compelled to let us know that there is still a warm heart in there.

As Jerry Herman’s 1974 musical progresses, this aspect becomes increasingly justified, for it is the story of the doomed love affair (the cliché is warranted in this case) between Sennett and one of his stars, Mabel Normand (who later became a director and co-starred with others strangely unmentioned: the C-word, Chaplin, is never spoken). Even so, given Sennett’s selfishness and monomania whereby everything had to be about two-reel comic movies, the description of him as “warm” may be pushing it a bit. Moreover, in terms of attention in the show, the and Mabel of the title is, so to speak, in much smaller lettering. Rebecca LaChance gets a rawish deal as Mabel, but she makes every moment count, from the initial open-spiritedness of the girl from the diner to her final drugged-out fatalism.

Herman has not packed Michael Stewart’s script with songs: there are a bare dozen numbers (excluding reprises) in the show. But they are mostly fine songs, and at least two of them, the love duet “I Won’t Send Roses” and the set-piece dance routine “Tap Your Troubles Away”, are major bankers; in Jonathan Church’s production with choreography by Stephen Mear, the latter is led by Anna-Jane Casey, whose character Lottie Ames runs Mabel a close second in prominence. But the quality of staging and performance cannot counteract the often patchy and sometimes downright perfunctory nature of the material. For such a large-scale piece to end on a simple shouted Sennett line (and, here, a video montage) rather than a climactic number leaves us feeling that both we and Herman have missed something.
 
Written for the Financial Times.