While the main Festival Theatre is
partially rebuilt and extended, Chichester has erected a large tent on
the lawn beside it. Inside, the £800,000 structure is clearly modelled
on the Festival space: its geometry is based on roundels rather than
hexagons, but it is broadly the same size and configuration. It is also
well enough air-conditioned to cope with even an unusually summery
summer.
And, of course, a big tent with a ring-shaped stage is a conceptually
perfect venue for a revival of Cy Coleman’s 1980 musical based on the
life and career of showman Phineas Taylor Barnum. Mark Bramble’s script
envisages staging as, if not an outright circus, certainly a succession
of carny-style spectacles and routines, and periodically the entire
cast goes into full-throttle greatest-show-on-earth mode: at one point
a rope-dancing acrobat was working two feet away from me (and several
above me) in the aisle.
In the title role (originated by Jim Dale), Christopher Fitzgerald is
on the compact side for such a larger-than-life figure. However, what
he lacks in stature and magnetism he makes up in energy: the part
entails not just acting, singing and dancing, but acrobatics,
prestidigitation and even a tightrope walk, executed by Fitzgerald
sans fakery and while finishing off
a musical number. Tamsin Carroll is more naturally engaging as his wife
Charity or “Chairy”, a realist with whom he constantly but always
lovingly clashed (a recurring motif has it that they know they’re all
right whenever they start arguing again). Other figures include General
Tom Thumb, played by full-size actor Jack North with his interlocutors
clambering on to the shoulders of others to maintain the perspective,
and Jenny Lind the operatic “Swedish nightingale” who in Anna O’Byrne’s
performance sounds rather more Welsh.
Timothy Sheader is an accomplished director of musicals, and is here
assisted by co-choreographer Liam Steel, late of DV8. Yet for all its
structural and presentational exuberance, the show never rises to the
source material. Barnum served as mayor of New York, he was twice
bankrupted and also became the richest man in America, but his life and
his life-long passion for imaginative forms of “humbug” are compacted
into a show which runs for barely two hours including a generous
interval, and which entertains for its duration but leaves little
lasting impression.
Written for the Financial
Times.