Hendon goes to New York
They closed Hendon again last Sunday as everyone went to the latest of the Lost Musicals in the Lilian Baylis Theatre in Sadler’s Wells. Ian Marshall Fisher’s season this year features two composers you wouldn’t swap for a busload of Priscillas or a coachload of tenth anniversary tenth rate Mamma Mias: Cole Porter and Kurt Weill.
Porter’s New Yorkers not only features three of his greatest songs — the prostitute’s street cry “Love For Sale,” the stomping, defiant anthem with great chiming chords “I Happen to Like New York” and the cheerful, chirpy finale hymning both East Side and West Side “Take Me Back to Manhattan”; it also made a Broadway star of Jimmy “Schnozzle” Durante.
This concert performance — repeated on the coming two Sunday afternoons — should make a star of Sandra Marvin (no relation of Blanche or Lee), a mountainous, beautiful black lady with a skin that glows and a voice that means business.
Marvin sings that great stonking anthem and does so with incredible style and velvety power, spiritedly accompanied on piano by the tireless musical director Steven Edis. This girl really does happen to love New York — and none of us sitting there was in any mood to argue with her.
New Yorkers is an odd show — it wasn’t a runaway success on Broadway in 1930 — with its cast of bootleggers, doxies, molls and unfaithful married parents of the society girl who falls for the head honcho Al Spanish.
Porter made room for Durante who wrote three comic numbers for himself and his two pals Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson (one of them is played at the Wells by Jud Charlton, last seen storming off in a huff out of the Ian Dury musical, Hit Me!).
Jud is terrific, as apparently he was as Dury, and his sidekick is sweetly done by Chris Stanton whose sparkling Ribena-coloured shoes liven up the evening dress code. Old Schnozzle himself is superbly impersonated by Michael Roberts, with plenty of vocal rasp and low cunning. The best of the songs is the bonkers tribute to “Wood” and its place in American history.
Some of the comedy loses puff in the second act — you sense individual turns of the original cast are missing — and the production deflates a little, no fault of Anna Francolini as the well-bred heroine with low tastes or Dawn Spence as the vampish Mona Low, a skeewiff version of Hollywood great Myrna Loy.
Marshall Fisher declared in his introductory remarks that the idea for the prohibition satire was suggested to Porter by the great cartoonist Peter Arno, an habitue of Park Avenue where bad women walked with good dogs.
Which segued nicely into the remark in the nightclub about there being two kinds of girl: those who do, and those who say they don’t.
It’s at the subsequent party that the plan is hatched to arrange a break-out from Sing Sing, the maximum security prison where they both sing sing and dance dance.
You can see why the show might not merit a full-scale revival, which is why these semi-stagings are so invaluable, apart from being so enjoyable.
Next up, in June, is Kurt Weill’s and Paul Green’s Johnny Johnson, an anti-war play with songs based on Brecht’s The Good Soldier Schweyk that managed only sixty-eight performances at the Group Theatre in 1936, so that’s a collector’s item to put it mildly. It has fifty-six characters, a singing Statue of Liberty and a witty burlesque of psychoanalysis. See you on the couch.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:44 am
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