Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Five stars
“The whole world’s gone lowbrow,” mourns
hard-hustling prison queen bee Matron ‘Mama’ Morton to beleaguered showgirl
Velma Kelly in John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse’s musical hitching up of
celebrity culture’s tissue-sized skirts.
If things were that bad in 1975, when the trio’s brash, flash and
hip-thrustingly trashy reinvention of journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins’ 1926 play
first appeared, pity how things have turned out
forty-odd years later.
Don’t be put off by the show’s deceptively serious
intent. As the high-kicking opener to Pitlochry’s Festival Theatre’s summer
season this year, Richard Baron’s production is sex on legs and pretty much any
other part of the body that can shimmy, wiggle or bump-and-grind.
Based around Niamh Bracken’s Velma and Lucie-Mae
Sumner’s Roxie and their respective fall and rise on the back of crimes
passionelle, Kander, Ebb and Fosse’s yarn is presented as a series of
after-hours cabaret routines with an open-plan prison theme. Baron’s
fifteen-strong ensemble set out their store from the off with a version of All
That Jazz which, for anyone not sure before, makes its libidinous intent
eye-poppingly explicit.
The sensation-seeking that follows is a sassy,
brassy construction, with Chris Stuart-Wilson’s Fosse-inspired choreography driven
by David Higham’s ten-piece speak-easy combo. Sumner in particular is a comic
mix of gum-chewing brittleness and strike-a-pose blonde ambition, while Carl
Patrick makes for a droolingly viperous Billy Flynn.
All of this combines to show how, in terms of
rags-to-riches success stories and the requisite amount of soul-selling
required to get rich, showbiz and crime are joined at the hip. It also lays
bare how, in terms of front page news, sex still sells. If all this looks like reality
TV and clickbait culture in waiting, it remains a ravishingly entertaining and deliriously
cynical evocation of American values gone wrong.
ends
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