Nancy buoys The Pajama Game
Anyone can see that the most appealing and most talented candidates to play Nancy in the upcoming production of Oliver! are both Irish: my money’s on Rachel, but I’m totally smitten by Niamh.
You can see why the BBC television audition show I’d Do Anything is so popular: it plugs straight into the nation’s enthusiasm for musical theatre in a way that musical theatre itself doesn’t, quite.
What do I mean? The people who love I’d Do Anything — despite the bumbling, off-colour remarks of panellist Barry Humphries and the nauseating cuteness of the Oliver boys — are left stone cold by Lord of the Rings and just about make do with Wicked. And they won’t even know about a delightful pocket-size production of The Pajama Game in the Union at Southwark.
There are several potential Nancys in The Pajama Game, not least the splendidly willowy Stephanie Nielson as Brenda, who falls in love across the picket line in the night garment factory; and the splendidly monikered Nicola Gossip as a brazen workmate.
This is the show with such great songs as “Hey There,” “There Once Was a Man,” and the two choric knock-out second act items, “Steam Heat” and “Hernando’s Hideaway.” The unhappy memory of Simon Callow’s effortful, overly intellectualised West End production ten years ago is banished in this cascade of charm, high kicks and high spirits.
Billy Boyle, late of Dirty Dancing, who spent part of his career as a Michael Crawford take-over (in Hello Dolly, No Sex Please, We’re British, and Billy), is the time and motion man to perfection, while Graham Weaver has an ideal 1950s quiff and innocence, and a beautifully unsullied voice, as the manager with the romance problem in the office.
Just fifty of us sat around the stage on Friday night as pajamas (they write pajamas, we write pyjamas) arrived at the crossroads, the company went out on a picnic and the non-Nancy candidates whipped up a storm and struck a new blow for musical theatre at its wittiest, snappiest and most thoroughly enjoyable in town.
The Pajama Game famously made a star of Shirley MacLaine as the soubrette Gladys, and Doris Day played the lead in the film. I doubt if Gillian McCafferty as Gladys, or indeed Stephanie as Brenda, will achieve such preeminence.
But they do jolly well, and so do the other “non-Nancys”, Kate Nelson, Maria Lawson, Victoria McKenzie, Mirain Haf Roberts and Kate Robson-Stuart. Graham Norton would undoubtedly tell them all that they could be Nancy (he should know). And so they could.
Final thought: why not just cast Denise van Outen as Nancy and have done with it? She’d be better than the whole lot of them.
