This weekend is your last chance to catch the fledgling new musicals programme in the Perfect Pitch festival in the Upstairs at the Gatehouse fringe theatre in Highgate Village.

I can’t say I had an overpoweringly happy experience when I went along last night, but there is something faintly touching about a theatreful of students carrying on like wannabe chrous lines in a series of not very good camp old high school musicals.

The Gatehouse is one of the theatres closest in London to my front door, so I make a point of not going there as often as possible.

The pub it is “above” is a rather good one, with a fair selection of real ales and good wines. It is patronised by sixthformers and masters from Highgate School across the road, and also by Nicol Williamson and Alan Brien.

But having a drink there last night with my colleague Roger Foss was like being trapped backstage at an end of term school concert with that overriding atmosphere of hysteria, body odour and slight sexual naughtiness that characterises such louche and torrid occasions.

The pupils of “Dunsinane High School” in a twenty-minute version of the Scottish play titled Macbitch were a mixture of blown-out blond boys and gym-slipped bad girls. Most of them came from the Arts Educational School at Tring Park, which must run a special course in sullen tartiness. If this was the future of the British musical, we’re in for some really scary nights out in a few years’ time.

Youth Music Theatre:UK chipped in with a full hour’s show which featured a young boy called Billy Elliot, which seemed a bit daft, and two dozen girls and boys in black who made the Nuremberg Rallies look a bit slipshod.

Again, it was all slightly frightening. What is this awful eagerness that underpins callow musical theatre, as if everyone’s aspiring to bring back the bad old days of Pan’s People and the Young Generation? I thought we’d gone through all that.

One half-hour musical with no students in it — playing this weekend — is one about Joe orton and Kenneth Halliwell, The Boys in the Front Room, with guest appearances by the agent Peggy Ramsay and the comic actor Kenneth Williams. That should be “some enchanted evening”, expecially when Ken bludgeons Joe to death on the settee then swallows his Nembutal.

No wonder the West End is resorting to the back catalogues of Abba, Blondie and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (incidentally, why is that group not called Frankie Valli and the Three Seasons; there’s only four of them in toto)…at least these people can write songs.

I didn’t hear one item at the Gatehouse that didn’t sound like a bad rehash of some long forgotten pop number, or a ghastly caterwauling derived from the bad “through-sung” example of Les Mis and Lloyd Webber imitators.

And when the grubby high school kids launched into the bad-tempered, scowling “The Best Days of Our Life,” we (I mean, Roger and me) simply curled up and pined inwardly for Salad Days and the innocent melodic charm of “We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back.”       

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.