PATRICK MARMION: In Dreams is a musical midlife crisis

2023-07-28

In Dreams is a musical midlife crisis that makes a fitting tribute to Roy Orbison, writes PATRICK MARMION

In Dreams (Leeds Playhouse)

Verdict: It’s got it

Rating:

Annie Get Your Gun (Lavender Theatre, Epsom, Surrey)

Verdict: Scatter-shot Annie

Rating:

Roy Orbison was a rock’n’roll ventriloquist. It was incredible how little the Big O, as they called him, had to open his mouth to create that sonic boom.

It was as if the man had recently endured root-canal surgery — but could still, somehow, blow the wigs off an audience.

So the big challenge for the new Orbison jukebox musical, led by American actress and singer Lena Hall, was whether it could live up to that extraordinary voice.

Written by David West Read — the author of the Max Martin catalogue musical & Juliet — the show has all-too-transparent designs on our tear ducts. But as Orbison himself might have said of Hall and the cast’s mighty singing: they’ve got it.

Set in a New Mexico diner, it’s a midlife crisis of a musical: Hall’s long, tall, rock singer Kenna invites former band members to celebrate the Mexican Day Of The Dead with her, after she’s been diagnosed with cancer.

The big challenge for the new Orbison jukebox musical, led by American actress and singer Lena Hall (right), was whether it could live up to that extraordinary voice

But however weird and tenuous the set-up may be, it’s just a pretext for songs ranging from I Drove All Night to Only The Lonely.

The emotional manipulation is cranked up with cascading drums and yearning guitar, typical of Orbison.

But ingeniously, West Read makes the songs fit the story seamlessly, as the friends gather to lament — and celebrate their lives with Kenna.

At its best, the production, directed by Luke Sheppard, has the atmosphere of a gig, with the silver-haired audience swaying and singing along.

Hall, as our skinny, gothic heroine who’s hit 40 and medical reality simultaneously, drives the show with a disdainful swagger — and one hell of a voice.

She is prone to running up and down the vocal scales at full tilt, but breaks up her mega-yodels with tender moments in songs such as Crying and Love Hurts.

Light relief is provided by Oliver Tompsett as Ramsey, a former lover and the band’s Cockney drummer (who carries his sticks tucked down the back of his jeans, snug in his builder’s cleavage).

Also amusing (and note perfect) are Sian Reese-Williams and Noel Sullivan as former band members who are now on to their fifth child.

But Manuel Pacific is outstanding as the grief-stricken cafe owner, who matches Orbison’s vocal technique from top to bottom in the title number.

The most popular characters are (unsurprisingly) the least self-pitying: Alma Cuervo and Richard Trinder as the wise Spanish grandma and the personal injury lawyer, who get it on in a technically brilliant and hilarious rendition of Pretty Woman.

None of the pain here matches that of Orbison, who lost a wife and children of his own. But this is surely a moody, broody must for lovers of this rock’n’roll colossus.

A jolly production of Annie Get Your Gun at the lavender-perfumed new open-air theatre in Epsom, Surrey, aims, according to director Simon Hardwick in the programme, to ‘challenge the status quo’ and inspire us to ’embrace the empowerment of women’.

Happily, it’s more successful at providing a hearty night out, with barbecue and beer tent.

This is just as well, as on the night I attended, the audience at the 200-seater venue, attached to a green-belt garden centre, hailed from as far afield as Norfolk, Yorkshire, Cornwall — and even Australia.

One elderly lady came dressed as an Indian squaw in celebration of the cowboys and Native Americans themed show. And no one seemed in search of Hardwick’s socio- political enlightenment.

Irving Berlin’s Hicksville musical features toe-tapping classics of the genre from There’s No Business Like Show Business to Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better).

As sharp-shootin’ cowgirl Annie Oakley, our 2018 Eurovision Song Contest entrant SuRie is hardly a feminist firebrand. More nanny than Annie, she could do with turbo-charging the whip-cracking attitude to bring Charlie McCullagh in line as chauvinist hunk Frank Butler.

But it’s a promisingly ambitious start in this new venue. Just come armed with blankets for the return of the traditional British summer.

Word-Play (Royal Court Theatre, London)

Verdict: Tricky

Rating:

Language is slippery stuff and has preoccupied playwrights from Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett. In Rabbiah Hussain’s tricky but tantalising new play, it’s seen as having viral qualities running through society in the wake of a Prime Minister’s gaffe. Who can she be thinking of?

The gaffe itself is not revealed, and the play itself is not concerned with traditional story telling.

Instead it’s a series of sketches traversing sundry locations and social situations. It starts in Downing Street, switches to a bus stop, goes on to alight on a ‘completely detached house in Highgate’ and, perhaps a little too predictably, winds up in a immigration detention centre — via a slew of other settings.

One of the more amusing (and comprehensible) scenes concerns the bovine public transport dictum ‘see it, say it, sorted’.

At another point a boyfriend (Issam Al Ghussain) wants to know why his politically correct girlfriend (Sirine Saba) calls him ‘different’.

Even salt levels in food can be construed as, if not racist, then culturally insensitive. Such is the paranoia of the society we have come to inherit.

But it’s also comic, and what’s clever and curious about Hussain’s play is the way it probes norms not everyone accepts. So we see a politician censored for using the word ‘weird’ on the radio. And there’s a playfulness in the way Hussain looks at how we use language on our phones, in personal relationships and in official situations.

The weirdness (if I may risk using that word) of the play’s non-linear structure is part of the point, but I’m not sure Hussain’s message requires this level of coding. There were periods in the 80-minute odyssey when I was completely lost.

Even so, Nimmo Ismail’s production, performed on office carpet tiles between a two-way mirror and a playground mural, always tantalises. It also has a lot of fun with words in ways that are all too uncommon on the modern stage, which is more concerned with policing language than enjoying it.

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