By
John Jeffay
1 min read
By
John Jeffay
Great voice Mr Pellow, but can we get back to you on the acting? There, I have said it, and risked the wrath of a million Wet Wet Wet fans.
Marti Pellow, heartthrob, pop icon, singer and songwriter puts in an impressive vocal performance in this musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic tale of a split personality .
But on stage he looks as though the puppeteer has cut his strings. Close your eyes and you will delight in the power and passion of his voice. Open them and you will wonder why he seems to be glued to the spot. As the tempo increased I saw his palms twitch slightly, and thought he was actually going to raise his arms. Alas, no.
He and his band had a huge hit with Love Is All Around - a record 15 weeks at number one in 1994- and I know from the YouTube video that his arms do actually move. But not on this stage.
To be fair, it is a pretty static production - all singing, but certainly not all dancing - so it is possible he was under instructions to keep still.
And, while we are being fair, maybe director Martin Connor deliberately asked for dour, understated delivery of dialogue, rather than something more animated.
Yes, Pellow has the brooding good looks needed for a dapper Dr Jekyll. And with a fur-collared cloak, top hat and cane he readily becomes the evil Mr Hyde. But any tension between his two selves is sadly lacking.
This was, for me, a flat production of missed opportunities. The plot is simple and familiar. Dr Jekyll is a fine if eccentric physician who wants to cure madness/badness, concocts a potion, tests it on himself with unexpected consequences and becomes Mr Hyde, a homicidal maniac.
Yet the key scenes that cried out for a wow factor remained under-played and under-exploited. The moment he first becomes a monster is an anticlimax. The final and desperate confrontation between Jekyll and Hyde calls for something really special. What we got was Jekyll in the flesh warring against Hyde, briefly, on a big screen. It did not do much for me.
The songs, primarily by Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn, almost carried the show, although even here there seemed to be a wealth of slow melodic numbers, and little else to vary the pace.
This was a show that demanded contrasts - between good and evil, dark and light, high and low tempo - and yet the whole thing seemed so much the same. The emotional peaks simply did not get the treatment they demanded.
Sarah Earnshaw as Emma (Jekyll's fiancée) and Sabrina Carter as Lucy (Hyde's love interest) put in creditable singing performances, but they too are cursed with an apparent inability to move.
(Tel: 0844 847 2277)
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