I'm a peace-loving soul but whoever invented the musical medley should be forced to wear padlocked headphones through which a never ending silage of song snippets should be fed until they are, well, dead. Perhaps that's a bit strong. But I do hope that they, and for that matter pliers of that banal form of popular music known easy listening find themselves trapped in a lift playing muzak until they are, well, dead.
This apparently happened to Spike Milligan once. He didn't die, but when they finally managed to prize open the doors of the lift in which he had been trapped for hours, they found him clutching the speakers that, up until the moment he had ripped them form the walls, had been playing a stream of soulless plinkety plonk inanity.
The medley is to music what bubble gum is to food. Stringing together great songs by segueing one into another is like dumping beautifully cooked dinner courses onto one plate. Like food, each serving of a song needs its own space to be consumed and digested. Appreciated. So fears for Burt Bacharach's catalogue - here "reimagined" by Canadian singer songwriter Kyle Riabko and his band - soared when a little bit of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head dribbled out of the back end this show's title song.
Yet the plusses of this New York import are at least as conspicuous as the minuses. The mood is cosy. The Menier auditorium has been draped in a smorgasbord of carpet and fabrics that make the place feel like someone's sitting room complete. There are even sofas.
In this somnolent setting the seven-piece band inject Bacharach's melodies with the drive and pulse of a generation who might never have heard Always Something There to Remind Me or I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself or I Say a Little Prayer....(the list is amazingly long). Certainly the cast in Steven Hoggett's production are young enough to believe that for them the Bacharach/ Hal David catalogue is completely new. And they play it in a way that breaks free of the past.
It's hard to imagine Dionne Warwick's version ever being eclipsed but Stephanie McKeon delivers Walk On By with a beautifully judged soulful solitude, and Anastacia McCleskey's version of Don't Make Me Over is a mix of tender hurt and power-singing defiance.
The good looking Riabko is also clearly super-talented. He sings well, plays guitar beautifully but in the moments where he and the band cut loose and his rampaging guitar solo makes forays into the audience it feels about as dangerous as Justin Bieber doing his best to be naughty.
Still, it all amounts to a very worthwhile makeover of some of the greatest pop music ever written. And when used delicately it turns out that medley doesn't have to be the ruination of a great song.
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