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Never was a musical of more woe
(Filed: 05/11/2002)
Charles Spencer reviews Romeo and Juliet at the Piccadilly Theatre
Apparently, during the first run-through of this new
musical, everyone was in tears by the final scene. One readily understands why.
It cannot be easy to watch millions of pounds and months of hard labour going down the pan.
"How long does it last?" a colleague asked someone closely connected with the show as she made her way into the theatre. "Until the end of the week if it's lucky," he replied.
As the Prince of Verona takes to the stage at the start, he warns the audience, in song: "If you think you've seen it all then you'd better think again. . .you're still not prepared for this."
He exaggerates, of course. Those of us who have sat through Bernadette, The Fields of Ambrosia, Which Witch and Napoleon, are quite capable of taking this dire travesty of Shakespeare's matchless love story in our stride.
Yes, it's witless, banal, clumsily staged, abysmally written and often buttock-clenchingly embarrassing, but hey, we veteran first-nighters aren't wimps. Roll on more tosh, we gaily cry and let's have another bucketful of thick schmaltz while you're about it.
Nevertheless, one can't help wondering what was going on in what passes for the minds of the show's producers. Romeo and Juliet has already given birth to one undisputed musical masterpiece, West Side Story. Did they really think this flatulent conception, with a dire Europop score by the French composer Gerard Presgurvic (no, I'd never heard of him either) and lyrics by our own Don Black (who ought to be hanging his head in shame) could stand comparison with Bernstein, Sondheim and Robbins's brilliant transposition of the story to 1950s New York? If they did, one can only conclude that the men in white coats will be coming to take them away pretty sharpish.
In David Freeman's production, Shakespeare's enamelled poetry has been stripped away to leave only the bare bones of the plot, with dreadful dialogue giving way to the kind of songs for which overblown kitsch seems a charitable description.
The costumes mix up the Renaissance, the Victorian and street-modern in a manner I suspect we are meant to call eclectic, and the sets consist of little more than a few climbing frames and blown-up prints of Renaissance paintings including a day-glo version of Botticelli's Birth of Venus.
Meanwhile the choreography by someone rejoicing in the single name Radha, looks as if it has been inspired by a 1971 edition of Top of the Pops, while his niminy-piminy fight scenes pack a far less impressive punch than John Prescott.
It's Black's lyrics that leave your jaw scraping the floor, though. "Forbidden love comes at a price / But it is worth the sacrifice," the young lovers chorus unconvincingly, but it is the nurse who has to plumb the depths of Black's bathos.
"Now she's in love and everything has changed," she trills, re Juliet. "Her feelings and her hair have all been rearranged."
It seems unforgivably cruel to land the 15-year-old Lorna Want with such a dire West End debut.
She's sweet and pretty and if her voice is sometimes uncomfortably strident, she nevertheless deserves better than this.
Andrew Bevis plays Romeo like a floppy-haired pretty boy from a particularly duff boy-band, while Jane McDonald's charmless, charisma-free performance as the nurse robs the role of the faintest hint of earthy humour.
To give the last word to Shakespeare, not a line of whose poetry survives in this lamentable tragedy of a show: "Never was a musical of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo."
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