The stakes are always high with a staged reboot of a cherished film. When it comes to works as sublime as Cole Porter’s musical, which started life as the 1956 MGM movie starring Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, the public are prone to protect memories of such masterpieces with the ferocity of a rabid badger.
Yet with director Rachel Kavanaugh’s fizzing new production of the musical the keepers of the flame are able to lower their guard early on when Felicity Kendal’s ditzy yet grounded Mother delivers a perfectly timed line about her daughter Tracy’s imminent and misguided marriage to boring accountant George Kittredge who, in every possible way, is the less attractive opposite to Tracy’s ex Dexter Haven, played by a charming Julian Ovenden.
“We all make mistakes dear,” says Kendal’s Mother of her daughter, “but this one is making her happy.”
A wave of relief accompanies the laughter. Over the following two hours expectations are met and hopes realised.
Similarly, when in her first musical since The King and I Helen George steps into the shoes of society girl Tracy Lord, a role forever played in the collective imagination by Kelly, you don’t exactly forget that original version, but George is more than good enough to allow us to forgive the presumption that she can replace it.
As with earlier iterations of the stage adaptation, this one cherry-picks from Porter’s back catalogue. It takes the achingly poetic ballad I’ve Got You Under My Skin, written for another MGM musical, Born to Dance, and owned by Sinatra since his album Songs For Swingin’ Lovers (also 1956) and lends it to Liz Imbrie’s paparazzi Carly who has arrived to document the shidduch (not her word) of the year.
Asked by Dexter what Carly would say to her colleague Mike Connor, a talented writer who is earning a living as a gossip hack, Carly answers by singing the song so beautifully that Sinatra is not missed. More to the point, unlike many songs plundered from back catalogues and crowbarred into the plots of jukebox musicals, this one feels like the right song in the right place at the right time. The same can be said of Be A Clown, which was first sung by Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in the film The Pirate.
Here it is mischievously deployed by Dexter and Tracy’s fun-loving uncle Willie (Nigel Lindsay) to persuade boring groom George to show his fun side. They do this knowing that he has no fun side to show.
The whole shebang is dominated by Tom Rogers’ design of a sandstone mansion, which makes the show feel as classy as it should. If I were to nitpick it would be that the explosive big numbers don’t quite reach the levels of ecstasy they are aiming for despite Anthony Van Laast’s wild choreography.
Yet the individual performances are all excellent. In his biggest musical moment since Brush Up Your Shakespeare on this stage’s revival of Kiss Me Kate a couple of years ago, Lindsay leads Bing Crosby’s That’s Jazz with a winning mixture of panache and dad-dancing.
Meanwhile, in the Sinatra role of journalist Mike Connor, Freddie Fox moves and croons as if this were his umpteenth musical instead of what it is, his first.
Quite how it was decided that this innately upper-class performer – a scion of the Fox acting dynasty – was the obvious choice to play a struggling writer with a class-conscious chip on his shoulder is beyond me. But he so embodies this show’s feel-good spirit, and with Ovenden delivers the gorgeous harmonies of Well, Did You Evah! so expertly, you can only be glad of his presence.
High Society
Barbican
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