Theatre
Theatre review: Blues in the Night
This isn't quite a musical, but it doesn't matter
August 7, 2019 15:42
This isn't quite a musical, but it doesn't matter
August 7, 2019 15:42Not every theatre needs a play or a musical on its stage. In the summer holidays especially a show need only to be a great evening out to justify its existence, like the mind-reading magician Marc Salem whom the Kiln hosted back in the day when it was the Tricycle. Or for something completely different there is this revival of Sheldon Epps’s 1980 off-Broadway show.
Perhaps Susie McKenna’s production could have done more to make this revamped theatre and its auditorium feel more like the 1930s depression-era Chicago hotel in which it is set.
But on stage all that is needed to suggest the transgressive, seediness of the place – and of the people who live there – is a neon hotel sign.
With its excellent on-stage jazz band the show is much more gig than anything else. But the producers call it a musical, presumably because the cast play characters.
Sharon D Clarke is The Lady, a former star singer, she tells us, who predicts she will one day will reclaim her rightful place in showbiz. But for now she is content to live in her room and with the memories of her glorious past.
She also serves as a wry, waspish and humane observer of her fellow residents – The Woman (Debbie Kurup) whose loneliness is made fleetingly bearable by drugs supplied by the Clive Rowe’s preying dealer – aka The Man.
Gemma Sutton is The Girl who, unlike her fellow hotel guests, is still hopeful that life can serve up something other than pain and loss – the two ingredients of every great blues song ever written, here by the likes of Ann Ronell (Willow Weep for Me) Bessie Smith (Blue Blues) and Duke Ellington (I’m Just a Lucky So-And-So).
You couldn’t hope for them to be better sung than they are in this production. On the back of her Oliver Award-winning title role performances in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, Or Change, and as Linda Lowman in Death of a Salesman, Clarke commands the evening with the voice and authority that has made her our greatest stage star.
But even she is slightly upstaged by Kurup whose performance suggests the kind of tragic backstory akin to Billie Holiday’s, while Rowe's octave-vaulting range recalls his Olivier-winning form in the National Theatre great revival of Guys and Dolls in which he played Nicely Nicely Johnson.
And as if that were not enticing enough, Sutton is like a brunette version Debbie Reynolds - not the all American girl version, but the sassy, savvy, irrepressible songstress. A great night out for theatregoers who fancy a gig rather than a play for a change.