On the strength of this first, tentative outing, concerts like this could come to rival those staged in the Encores! series in New York or by the Production Company in Australia. Jonathan Groff was truly terrific – and one was left wanting to see him headline a full scale production of this show, with Cynthia Erivo and Hannah Waddingham (and Amy Ellen Richardson) by his side.
Gay themed theatre can be hit and miss at the best of times but Chandler, Miller, Dexter and Todd have fashioned an evening that could well break free of its LGBT base and find a wider audience.
However, there is an uncertainty of tone about the piece as a whole that does not entirely convince. The evening starts as a straight-forward thriller but then seems to change as the plot twists multiply into a knowing send-up of the genre instead. There is nothing wrong with this, but at points, particularly in the rapid-fire, almost farcical later scenes it was not clear which view should predominate, whether one was supposed to empathise or simply laugh at the characters. On the night I visited there was clearly some laughter in the wrong places, and the audience did not know what to make of the emotional tone.
This is a harrowing but necessary evening in which the transcripts of seven interviews with American women veterans of Afghanistan and the second Iraq War are woven together into a compelling gendered commentary on the pity of modern war.
This is a genuinely terrific night in the musical theatre. Gypsy aside, there is nothing to touch it currently playing in London in terms of value for money and sheer, unrelenting happiness. Emma Barton has heart in spades and performs with a lustrous, warm allure which is both seductive and motherly. Ria Jones is a gifted performer, a delicious singer, and she brings a wealth of experience, and a warm, luscious tone to her carefully delivered renditions of Herman’s standards. Sarah-Louise Young’s comic work in Take It All Off and La Cage Aux Folles is gloriously amusing.
All credit to Jamie Harper and his ebullient, energetic team for a superb evening of thought-provoking fun. Do catch it while it is still running so as to give yourself a bit more faith in the possibilities of the political process, whatever you may feel about the level of debate in real life.
Most immediately Kingmaker recognizes the extent to which the rewards in politics go to those whose priorities remain resolutely fixed on the rules of the game and not to those who pursue resolutions to personal, messy, unpredictable human objectives outside or secondary to those rules. This is not the old argument that politics is about succeeding rather than about implementing policy, but rather the narrower point that politicians will ultimately stick with and support each other because they are comfortable in the knowledge that they understand and speak the same language.
The first fifteen minutes or so of Act Two are as good as, if not the equal of, any fifteen minutes of any musical currently playing on the West End (the final fifteen minutes of both of Gypsy’s acts excluded). In the main, this is down to three things: superb orchestrations (Chris Walker), fantastic musicianship (Theo Jamieson, Joe Stilgoe and a red hot band) and inspired, creative choreography (Nathan M Wright). Together, these three magical elements work musical theatre alchemy, and the cast go along with it infectiously, without restraint.
