Drab by comparison to the film: Bonnie & Clyde, at the Garrick Theatre, reviewed

The murderous odyssey of Bonnie and Clyde is a tricky subject for a musical because the characters are such loathsome wasters and their grisly ambition is to fleece poor people at gunpoint during the Great Depression. They’re famous for stealing from banks but they changed tack once they realised that grocery stores and funeral parlours were easier to rob. The little guy was their real target. In this revived musical, written in 2009, the principal figures have no redeeming qualities at all. Bonnie is a beautiful brain-dead popsicle who dreams of becoming a poet or a movie star. Nowadays she’d be ranting on TikTok from the front seat of an SUV. Clyde is an amoral thug who shoots dead anyone who comes between him and his greed. His chief aim is to outdo the questionable achievements of Al Capone. The pair killed 13 people during their reign of terror and this gory headcount is announced in the opening scene, which also features the notorious ‘death car’ whose bullet-riddled coachwork is one of the story’s enduring symbols. Since the audience knows the ending before the story gets started, the only source of interest is in the journey itself. And it’s less than thrilling.

The gang’s opponents, the cops who struggled to arrest them, are portrayed as a bunch of swaggering, heartless oafs who bicker among themselves while the criminals roam free across the midwest murdering bank clerks and the odd detective. Much stage time is spent on Clyde’s hapless brother, Buck, who tags along and tries to get the couple to quit crime and settle down in the suburbs. Since we know he fails, his mission is hard to care about. The great Hollywood movie from 1967 overshadows this production whose lead actors, Frances Mayli McCann (Bonnie) and Jordan Luke Gage (Clyde), can’t possibly match the rock-star glamour and charismatic playfulness of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty.