SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS
  Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, London NW1

Opened 23 July, 2015
****

Seven Brides For Seven Brothers does not deserve its reputation as the most unsound of the Hollywood golden age musicals. Rachel Kavanaugh’s production – bright gingham in terms both of costuming and atmosphere – is dominated by Laura Pitt-Pulford as Milly, the first of the brides of a family of 1850s farmers in the Oregon mountains, singing up a storm and with her American accent morphing at moments of anger into Irish.

Milly similarly gives the Pontipee homestead its character, firstly filing the rough edges off the other brothers’ mountain manners; then, when they misunderstand the ancient Roman story of the Rape of the Sabine Women and abduct a clutch of potential wives from the nearest township, it is Milly who keeps the homestead together, with the women inhabiting the farmhouse while the brothers freeze out the winter in the barn.

This is a story about the brothers’ learning how to comport themselves around other people; the values underlying that comportment are pretty much innate. More even than that, it is about Milly herself, keeping her body and a dozen other souls together (whilst husband Adam sulks in a log cabin offstage), handling a pregnancy and reconciling everyone’s ideals with rough reality. This is a woman with the force of personality to kiss a man’s moustache clean off, as nearly happened with Alex Gaumond’s Adam on press night. The clichéd view of the show as being, as the axe dance in the “Harvest Social” sequence suggests, all about men waving their choppers around is far too reductive.

The songbook does not yield many classics: apart from the arguable case of the malapropised “Sobbin’ Women”, the show’s greatest hit, “Bless Your Beautiful Hide”, is fired off in the very first minutes, without even an overture here to whet the appetite. Nevertheless, it works. On Peter McKintosh’s timber-skeleton set, Kavanaugh plays up the comedy and the warmth at once: in the embrace of reconciliation at the end, so sudden that Milly has no time to put down the babe in her arms, Adam decorously covers the little ’un’s eyes. The idea of such a tale may offend 21st-century sensibilities, but the execution of it is thoroughly disarming.
 
Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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