Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I saw eight shows in London. I chose mostly productions I thought would be unlikely to move to New York, including three musicals.

The immersive staging by Nicholas Hytner of the Broadway classic Guys and Dolls at the Bridge turned out to be as joyous as promised. I sat in a gallery and it was like looking down on a relentlessly entertaining train set, with lots of lights and colors and moving parts. I also had a great view of the orchestra and enjoyed watching instrumentalists play particular solo lines.

Much of the show’s audience chooses to watch the show on their feet, guided to and fro by crowd handlers dressed as cops as different configurations of platforms rise to be dressed as the Salvation Army mission, a coffee shop, the Hot Box, etc. The timing is precise and the blocking and musical staging capitalizes on this constantly shifting world. If a dancer extends a foot, a platform rises to meet it in time for them to put weight on it. It strikes me that this kind of staging works particularly well because (except for the Cuban scenes) the show is an exploration of a specific milieu. (It similarly strikes me that Oliver! would work well staged this way.)

There is one interpretive oddity. Sky Masterson, the gambler, is usually played as the coolest of the cool, unflappable and poised. The actor I saw as Sky (Andrew Richardson) played him as a cousin of the Fonz, so the Sky-Sister Sarah story, which is usually played as the serious romantic line (in contrast to the comic line of Nathan and Adelaide) plays as another comic line. Instead of shifting as Guys and Dolls usually does between romance and comedy, this production shifts between two modes of comedy, and that undercuts some of the lyricism of Frank Loesser’s score for me. But it was still a blast of an evening.

There is talk of bringing it to the States. I had a short chat with Cedric Neal (an actor from New York who is the spectacular Nicely-Nicely) and he said that an initial look at Circle in the Square Uptown didn’t seem that it would be feasible given the technical needs. There’s some speculation that people with money–as they would have to be–are investigating building a new theater in New York on the model of the Bridge so that there would be a home for this and other productions requiring a large black box facility. I wonder where they would build it.

The musical version of the Graham Greene-Sir Carol Reed film classic, The Third Man (book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, music by George Fenton, direction by Trevor Nunn) suggests that there is a possible show in the material, but the creators haven’t found it yet. For one thing, they seem to be too in thrall of Cabaret (two songs for the female lead, a nightclub performer, sound like candidates for Sally Bowles that weren’t used).

A key problem I think is in the way the central character, Holly Martins, is introduced. Holly is an American arriving in Vienna in the wake of World War II. That he is an American is key. He is part of the wave of Americans who arrived in postwar Europe celebrating the victory over fascism and hoping to bring American-style democracy to the corrupt old world. Specifically, Holly thinks he is meeting his old friend Harry Lime to join his medical business. The story is (or should be) how Holly’s optimism and idealism are undermined by the new corruption flourishing in Vienna. During the course of the action, he discovers that Lime, embodying his own version of American values, is at the heart of a particularly appalling strain of that corruption. (In a sense, Holly and Harry are the American character split into naive and cynical halves.) That’s what I think the story should be. But in this telling Holly never has an opportunity to show his idealism. He arrives in Vienna and is instantly put off by the poverty and desperation around him, and disturbed to find that Harry has apparently died in a traffic accident. What should be a story of Holly’s journey to disillusion starts with him confused and agitated, so the character has the opportunity to make a very limited journey.

I think there are other problems, but they could be addressed. But I don’t believe they can be addressed until the issue of Holly’s journey is addressed. (This is not to criticize Sam Underwood as Holly. He does very well with what he’s been given, projecting touching decency in contrast to the rest of the ensemble and singing well.)

Operation Mincemeat is a story that has been told before in two films (the 1956 feature The Man Who Never Was and a 2022 movie also called Operation Mincemeat). They told the essentially true story of British intelligence agents who fitted up the body of a homeless man with the identity of a British officer carrying counterfeited papers suggesting the British would attack Sardinia rather than Sicily during WWII. The idea was to have the Germans discover the papers, believe them and shift their forces away from Sicily (where the British were indeed planning on landing) as a way of reducing British casualties from the invasion. The operation apparently was a rousing success. Both films gave some serious consideration to the morality of turning the body of a human being into a prop for deception. This is of some concern to the writers of Operation Mincemeat the musical, written by David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts. Indeed, the most moving moment in the show involves a woman in the spymaster’s office helping compose a love letter to be found in the body’s pocket to make the created identity convincing. As the woman (played by a man) sings a draft of the letter, we become aware that she is drawing on painful personal history.

Most of the rest of the show, however, is played in farcical, almost cartoony terms. The couple dozen characters (played by five resourceful actors) are broadly drawn and indulge in a fair amount of physical comedy. Ultimately the show suggests that for a certain class of Englishman, some of the war was a grand game. Those who lost members of their families in WWII might have a problem with this. I suspect this is part of what the writers intended–to show how class privilege is manifested in old boys’ club hijinks even in the middle of tragedy.

Much of the score features densely rapped lyrics in the Hamilton mode. I enjoyed and admired it, and the audience around me was enthusiastic. But I do have my doubts as to whether it would reach a general American audience. But then, some years ago when I was visiting London I saw a play I admired called Charles III and thought it was way too British to make the trip to Broadway. And I proved to be wrong about that.