Ever since he handled the 1997 Broadway
opening of Cy Coleman’s 1990 musical, the venerable director Michael
Blakemore has wanted to stage it in London. Twenty years later
Blakemore, now aged 88, has rung the curtain up in the 240-seat
Southwark Playhouse. It shows his customary care and sensitivity, but I
fear the intervening years have not been kind.
It was already something of a period piece when first written,
co-writer Ira Gasman’s idea being to portray the seamy community around
New York’s 42nd Street before the district was sanitised. Blakemore’s
production is sympathetic, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that every
single female character in the piece is a prostitute (all right, one
progresses from go-go dancer to porn movie star), while almost every
male character is nominally a pimp or hustler of some kind, but in
effect a low-rent gentleman of leisure. The sexism is not interrogated;
indeed, when the women enter the annual Hookers’ Ball one by one in
their slinky finery, we are implicitly encouraged to look on them as
objects in exactly the same way.
The subject matter itself is a little more complex. What it amounts to
is that, without a twist of some kind – the Runyonesque cartooning of
Guys And Dolls, say, or the slight
whitewashing that Coleman himself gave to Fellini’s
Nights Of Cabiria when turning it
into
Sweet Charity – stage
musicals involving sex workers are always likely to seem patronising,
like a kind of slumming in song. It can be avoided, but Coleman’s
jaunty-with-a-touch-of-soul score and Gasman’s predictable lyrics must
surely always have been on the quaint side for such a topic.
As I say, though, it’s a strong staging. Musical stalwarts Sharon D.
Clarke and Cornell S. John are both first-rate as the older characters,
and T’Shan Williams responds well to the challenge in her central role
as Queen, the prostitute enmeshed in various men’s schemes. As for the
narrator-figure, though, something makes me think the emptiness in his
eyes is attributable to actor John Addison rather than the character
Jojo. And however much brio, nearly three hours (plus a further
half-hour due to opening-night delays) is a long time to feel uneasy
about the entire basis of a show.
Written for the Financial
Times.