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.