Demand for new musicals has reached the point where investors are ready to sink funds into a whole new method of production — the we-can’t-write-a-musical-so-let’s-write-a-musical school of musicals. In the latest effort the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan has been crossbred with the songs of Blondie. A terrible ugliness is born. The songs don’t fit the film and the film doesn’t fit the theatre. Bored housewife, Roberta, mooches around New York looking for romantic kicks while her cold, philandering husband half-heartedly tries to find her. Feeble aims, ghastly people. Susan, the pivotal figure, is an attitude rather than a character, a random parasite whose gimme-all-you-got-and-get-lost outlook is hard to warm to.
The story relies on fidgety details, mismanaged phone calls, newspaper ads, a pair of lost Egyptian earrings, and the narrative is so boringly complex that the show has to shut down every few minutes while the latest plot twist is thumped home or while the location uproots itself for somewhere new. Symbolic props are constantly being trundled in and out. Here’s a sink. There’s a bed. Here comes a film projector. This doorway has bars so it must be a jail. That doorway says ‘Diner’ so it’s probably a diner. These flimsy bits of carpentry are all on wheels and some of them roll when the actors lean on them.
The cast are OK, some are goodish, none leaps out and compels your adoration. In general the girls are satisfyingly gorgeous but the boys are geeks and mutants, sunburnt dwarves with perfunctory eyes and improbable noses. The affair between Roberta and Dez, a film school dropout, is woefully miscast. Kelly Price’s Roberta is a luminously beautiful blonde in her early twenties while Alec Newman’s Dez is ten years older, the height of a jockey, with beige hair and a timid scowl scribbled all over his face.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in