Summer froth

Midsummer. Holidays loom. Migrations are being pondered and planned. Right now the English theatre-going middle classes are yearning for August, for Tuscany, for the pine-scented South, and for the sunbeds where they’ll sprawl and doze all summer smeared in perfumed lard and turning the colour of teak. Lovely. The West End is ready for these adjustments and from now until September it’ll provide what the British film industry has to supply all year round — cultural room-service for Americans. You start to wonder why Americans go abroad at all. Perhaps to discover how unadventurous they are, how closely they cleave to the known, the familiar, the homely.

This year’s lucrative game of catch-yank begins at the Novello with a Broadway import, The Drowsy Chaperone. This is a musical about musicals but don’t run for cover yet, it’s actually pretty good. The curtain rises on an effeminate loner sitting at home playing show-tunes on an ancient stereo.