Reviewing the Musical Situation in London

If music is the food of theater love, then London is currently stuffed to the gullet.

For Cameron Mackintosh’s just-opened revival of Lionel Bart’s super-tuneful Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, flavor-of-the-year director Rupert Goold has been hired to essentially recreate Sam Mendes’ 1994 version. The result is the powerhouse entertainment that the adaptation of Charles Dickens’ tale of orphan Oliver Twist has always been since its 1960 bow — and there’s no denying audiences get their money’s worth. Yet, with one exception — I’d Do Anything reality-show winner Jodie Prenger singing Nancy’s “As Long as He Needs Me” from a battered heart — watching this Oliver! unfold on Anthony Ward’s dusted-off sets and under Paule Constable’s stunning lighting is like watching a finely-crafted mechanical wind-up toy. The approximately 50 boys in the opening “Food Glorious Food” number pump to Matthew Bourne’s choreography like so many pistons in an engine. And foremost, there’s the beloved — if somewhat subdued — Rowan Atkinson playing the devious, hand-rubbing Fagin.

By contrast, Craig Revel Horwood’s chamber-musical treatment of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Don Black-Christopher Hampton Sunset Boulevard, now at the Comedy Theater, comes off less like a standard revival of the formerly elephantine-scale musical than as a skillful refitting. This refreshing take originated at The Watermill Theatre, where budgetary concerns often dictate that actors must also be the instrumentalists. Yet, Horwood proves that actors-as-orchestra is a reliable style. Moreover, the theater’s intimacy makes faded silent screen star Norma Desmond (shiningly sung by Kathryn Evans) more sympathetic, which also gives screenwriter-turned-gigolo Joe Gillis (sexy Ben Goddard) more reason to hang around. Indeed, Horwood’s staging of the players alternatively acting and playing becomes an urgent counterpoint to the drama.

Trevor Nunn has directed his first Stephen Sondheim work, A Little Night Music, now at The Menier Chocolate Factory. By musical’s end, aging actress Desiree Armfeldt (Hannah Waddingham singing “Send in the Clowns” as well as it’s ever been sung) and her imperious mother (played by the precise Maureen Lipman) entertain a variety of friends and lovers at their country house, most of whom eventually go into the woods for wising up. The production not only proves (again) that Sondheim is a literate lyricist who will never be topped; but more importantly, Nunn and designer David Farley get the look and feel of the show, derived from Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, just right.

It would require great effort not to cherish Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel, now at the Savoy, which has some of the most gloriously passionate songs ever written for the musical theater. As star-crossed lovers Julie Jordan and Billy Bigelow, Alexandra Silber and American import Jeremiah James deliver the vocal goods, as does local favorite Lesley Garrett, who raises the roof with “June is Busting Out All Over” and tears audiences up on “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” in the role of Aunt Nettie. Yet the look of this Carousel is strangely dichotomized by set designer William Dudley. For the most part, the stage looks in its economical way like it might have at its 1945 premiere, but every so often digitalized projections are thrown up that suddenly declare state-of-the-2009-art.

It would be incorrect to contend that Terry Johnson’s small-scale version of La Cage Aux Folles, at the Playhouse Theatre, is better than earlier productions of this popular musical. But it absolutely matches the best of them for achieving the cheer and sentiment in Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s celebration of love — whether it be heterosexual or homosexual — and cross-dressing (even if there are only six Cagelles on hand).

There’s not much good to say on behalf of Thriller Live, now at the Lyric. A sextet of singers with big voices (Ricko Baird as the Michael Jacksonest of them, alongside Ben Foster, John Moabi, Denise Pearson, Roger Wright, and young Kieran Alleyne) re-do blockbusters from such classic CDs as Thriller and Bad as best as they can, while a pack of dancers break-dance up a non-stop storm. Lots of lights flash to generate rock excitement, but the enterprise has the weird effect of looking as if it’s escaped from a 30-year-old time capsule. Where a great opportunity to revivify and reinterpret Jackson’s work existed, a major disappointment emerges.

Admittedly, it’s a stretch to call Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, the revived Tom Stoppard-Andre Previn allegory of political repression, now at the National Theatre, a musical. On the other hand, with a full orchestra on stage, there’s a load of symphonic music abounding as two men in prison garb, Ivanov (Toby Jones) and Alexander (Joseph Millson), occupy adjoining downstage beds. The former, wielding a triangle, imagines he’s conducting an orchestra and won’t be talked out of his dementia. The latter is preoccupied with being incarcerated for defending a wrongly accused colleague and is also worried about the effect of his predicament on young son, Sasha (Bryony Hannah). While Stoppard wants to lodge a protest — and succeeds as Previn’s sumptuous music swells and recedes under Simon Over’s conducting of the Southbank Sinfonia — what he’s actually saying about the fantasizing Ivanov coming to grips with reality is nevertheless slightly muddled.