THE WILD PARTY
The Other Palace, London SW1
Opened 20 February, 2017
***

The St James Theatre has more often than not presented musicals. Now, rebranded by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, it is officially dedicated to them. The new name puns partly on its proximity to Buckingham Palace, partly on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s tryout venue The Other Place: some of the presentations here will be in transitional form, as Lloyd Webber professes himself frustrated by what he claims is the impossibility nowadays of tweaking a major musical during preview performances.

The first offering under its new colours, however, is a properly finished revival by Drew McOnie of Michael John LaChiusa’s 2000 musical based on Joseph Moncure March’s book-length poem of 1928. Showpeople Queenie and Burrs throw a soirée fuelled by bathtub gin and attended by folk ranging from a boxer to “a postmodernist”; all kinds of entanglements involving sex, money and power ensue.

Coincidentally, Andrew Lippa unveiled an off-Broadway musical version of the poem at around the same time as LaChiusa’s opened on the Great White Way itself. (Let us not speak of the 1975 Merchant Ivory film with Raquel Welch as Queenie.) LaChiusa and co-scriptwriter George C Wolfe still centre their show on the love triangle/quadrilateral involving Queenie, Burrs, the newcomer Black and arguably his partner Kate. However, they also give plot time to virtually every one of their dozen or so other characters. At times this threatens to unleash an atmosphere of overplotted 1970s disaster movie, but by and large the threads are successfully drawn together.

McOnie realises that the stage of this 300-odd-seat venue isn’t big enough for serious musical-theatre cavorting, so his choreography is generally an impression of exuberance rather than the thing itself, not unlike LaChiusa’s adroit jazz-age pastiche work in his musical numbers. Frances Ruffelle has such a wealth of music-theatre experience that she could play Queenie in her sleep; perhaps a more waking, less “heady” singing voice would help here, though, as the vocal mix in general (especially on ensemble numbers) finds itself vying with the instrumentation under Theo Jamieson. Nevertheless, it’s a more than respectable middle-scale staging of a Broadway musical which has yet to make it to the West End proper.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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