REVIEW: The World Goes Round, Union Theatre ✭✭

The World Goes Round

Union Theatre

February 7 2014

2 Stars

The work of John Kander and Fred Ebb is sensational. Their catalogue of work is breath-taking in its scope, depth and possibility. Their music and lyrics require thrilling performers, singers with the power to not just sing or belt, but who can tell a story and let the magic of the music be magnified by their own vision, their own power, their own horizons.

Indeed, if you are singing a Kander and Ebb song, you really need to start it at (at least) half-strength but have the capacity to move from that starting point and soar, crescendo and then keep going. Singing their songs is not for the faint-hearted or the insipid. It is no co-incidence that divas the world over, male and female, revel in the lush promise of the wonderful tunes this clever, incredibly talented duo composed.

In 1991, Scott Ellis, Susan Stroman and David Thompson created a revue to feature and showcase the Kander & Ebb repertoire, some well known, some not so well known. It was a showcase for five wonderful performers. It was called The World Goes Round and it is currently being revived at the Union Theatre in a production directed by Kirk Jameson, with musical supervision by Richard Bates, musical direction by Michael Riley and choreography by Sam Spencer Lane.

In a curious move, the five soloists envisaged by the creators are joined here by five much much younger "shadows", each of whom has recently graduated from one or other of the Performing Arts schools in London, from which each seems to have risen without a trace and certainly with no appreciation or aptitude for stage performance. Each seems to have excelled in "Bad Stage Face 101" and Shahail Woodstock, in particular, has a permanent sneer which cuts a swathe through his boyish charm. To be fair to them, none of these five shadows has anything decent to do and they are completely superfluous to the needs and requirements of the revue. Indeed, their presence makes the leads take it easy when they ought to be working really hard. What is most appalling about each of the shadows is their utter blandness; there is no spark of divine fire here. And in the boys there is way too much focus on adopting a pose or a stance (usually a completely ridiculous or quite effeminate one, regardless of the inherent masculinity of the text or song or subtext) rather than a performance that is seamless and enhances the work of the principals.

But for that the creatives must be blamed. Together with their lacklustre ideas about staging, their hideous interpretations of the numbers and the overall complete inability to understand what a revue is or how to make it work - this really is as lamentable as a production of this revue could ever be. Execrable makes it sound better than it was.

Of the five leads, only Simon Green came close to what the material demands, and then not that close. Vocally, the music was quite beyond all of the leads. Not a single song was sung with the passion, the intensity, the life, the joy, the charm, the spirt or the simple understanding that these compositions deserve - nay, demand. There was so much out of tune singing that one could be excused for thinking that these were Kander & Ebb variations, rather than the real thing.

The harmonies were off, the lyrics were not precisely delivered, the rhythms were ignored, the sense of the story-telling often entirely abandoned. Perhaps somewhere you would hear worse versions of Class, Ring Them Bells, Money, Money, Maybe This Time, A Quiet Thing, All That Jazz, Mr Cellophane or Cabaret but I suspect you will have to work very hard to find them. Gareth Snook, Lisa Stoke, Emma Francis and Susan Fay - nothing of real interest from any of them. Seriously, is there no one who can act and sing who would audition for this production?

The Union Theatre often does excellent work. Some of its productions have been inspiring and insightful and demonstrate the sheer power of the material with which the creatives and cast work.

This production of The World Goes Round does precisely the opposite - it hides, entirely, the value of the work and asserts mediocrity or worse, absence of skill, as worth celebrating.

Quite simply, it is not.

In a week when the "other" (Sondheim) revue, Putting It Together, closed at the St James' Theatre after a terrific run, this childish and facile production pales into insignificance.

Yet, the work itself, which curiously here is presented absent a killer duet, The Grass Is Always Greener, is a wondrous piece of theatrical magic. It deserves better treatment. Much much better.