.....COMMITTEE..... at the Donmar: Sing Out Those Sentences Camila!

COMMITTEE.... not the best musical title eh?  It's not even COMMITTEE!  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single word musical title needs an exclamation mark to really give it that zing.  Ah but Constant Reader, that's because COMMITTEE isn't actually called that...  Got your reading eyes in?

The actual title is THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE TAKES ORAL EVIDENCE ON WHITEHALL'S RELATIONSHIP WITH KID'S COMPANY.  Try and get that on a badge and a mug for the merch stand.  The title nearly lasts longer than the show as it runs only 80 minutes.

Is there any reason for this show to be a musical?  No.  Is there any reason for this Committee to be a show?  Actually I would say yes as it was constantly interesting to observe two immovable objects colliding: the Government and Camila Batmanghelidjh the self-publicizing CEO of the children's charity that spectacularly crashed and burned in 2015.  Donmar artistic director Josie Rourke and the inexplicably-popular actor (at the Donmar anyway) Hadley Fraser wrote it while Tom Deering is the composer of a score that is ever-present but only there to string the words together.

I was never bored - at 80 minutes there really is no time to be bored - but I was exasperated by the twee doodlings that passed as songs.  With the Committee chair Bernard Jenkin becoming increasingly exasperated at Batmanghelidjh and Trustee Chariman Alan Yentob's (yes, him from the BBC) refusal to answer even the most basic questions allied to her larger-than-life personality and his preening ego, you would think that grand themes could be found for them but no.  Wispy tunes go in one ear and out the other...

Being a worker in the Third Sector, I found the dissection of the catastrophic situation that the charity allowed itself to get into fascinating.  I have always been immune to the cult of personality that was Camila Batmanghelidjh - her standard bleat being that any criticism of her or her charity must mean that the questioner was against helping any under-privileged children and was probably racist too.  To see her shown to be the smoke and mirrors expert she was, with her spurious claims to be a registered psychotherapist and her outlandish threats to use her unique access to tv and print media to get what she wanted, was schadenfreude of the highest quality.

The trouble with the show - as with any verbatim theatre - is that ultimately the writer / adapter can never show any real stance either way: so Batmanghelidjh is seen dodging questions with lumbering ability but is then given a big song about how she is just doing it for her children without any sense of irony.  It's like the text is showing her to be untrustworthy but the writers desperately still want to present her as a heroine.  No such qualms with Alan Yentob who is shown to be name-dropping and self-important, and indeed it is his character that provides the climactic blunder when he tells the committee that there was never any real need to worry about Kid's Company finances as the Government would always give them money.

I suspect we had an insider audience on our night as there was lots of knowing laughs at innocuous lines, it did feel like there was a level just playing to that part of the peanut gallery.  What I also found vaguely annoying was that the show just stops dead - there was a lot of set-up with civil servants telling you who all the participants were, what the background was and the purpose behind the committee.  But the show ended with the Chairman thanking the two witnesses amid shuffling papers.  It all seemed to suggest that there was no real reason for it or the audience to have shown an interest in the past 80 minutes.

For me, the show failed because of it's inconclusive structure and drab score but it was briskly directed by Adam Penford and the bland, neutral committee room was well duplicated by Robert Jones.  Luckily too, there were some real stand-out performances: Sandra Marvin was very impressive as Batmanghelidjh, negotiating the odd Sin-Bin trough in the stage with her padding and large frock, but she shone through all that to deliver an impassioned performance.  Sadly Omar Ebrahim as Alan Yentob had no match to Sandra's charisma and his opera voice was too top-heavy for the score.

I really liked Alexander Hanson's performance of Bernard Jenkin, the suave chair of the committee who looked very happy at the prospect of getting the 8am interview slot on the Radio 4 TODAY programme but I liked the way he showed Jenkin becoming more and more rattled by his witness' stone-walling.  Anthony O'Donnell as very good as the combatitive Welsh Labour MP Paul Flynn as was Robert Hands as the milder David Jones MP.

There were also sparkling performances too from Rosemary Ashe as a terrier-like Kate Hoey (landing her difficult accent to a tee) and Rebecca Lock - standing in for an absent Liz Robertson - as the Conservative MP Cheryl Gillan; patronizing, condescending and blithely mispronouncing 'Batmanghelidjh', Lock nailed the archetype Tory female to perfection.

So in conclusion: if you are going to make a musical then write music to lift the show and if you are going to do verbatim theatre musicals - don't.

The 7 Shows of Xmas 5: CITY OF ANGELS

Finally, here it was... the one I had most been looking forward to seeing this Christmas. One of my all-time favourite shows, CITY OF ANGELS at the Donmar was bound to fall short of my high expectations - but by how much, Constant Reader?

CITY OF ANGELS, directed by Michael Blakemore, opened on Broadway in 1989 where it ran for over two years, in the process winning the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Best Musical, Best Book for Larry Gelbart and Best Score for Cy Coleman & David Zippel.

It appeared in London in 1993 but, despite Blakemore again directing and with the great cast of the late Martin Smith, Roger Allam (perfect as the private eye Stone), Henry Goldman (also perfect as the manipulative film producer/director Buddy Fiddler) and the dazzling Film Noir siren quartet of Susannah Fellows, Haydn Gwynne, Sarah Jane Hassell and Fiona Hendley, the show managed only 8 months at the Prince of Wales.  However it still won the Olivier Award that year for Best Musical.

A loving celebration of Film Noir thrillers, Gelbart's wonderfully witty book tells of Stine, a NY crime writer who is lured to Hollywood - against his editor wife's wishes - to write the script for a film adaptation of City of Angels, the latest novel to feature his private eye hero Stone.  However once there, he finds it difficult to remain faithful to his creation with the constant meddling of his tyrannical producer/director Buddy Fiddler - to say nothing of remaining faithful to his wife.  Eventually even his hero has to make his feelings known...

Even without Coleman & Zippel's delicious score, Gelbart's book would be a joy as he switches the action constantly between Stine writing the script and the fictional world he is creating for his hard-bitten private eye alter-ego Stone amid an array of Film Noir characters: the mysterious wife of the decrepit wealthy man, the night-club singer that broke Stone's heart, the lovelorn Girl Friday, the nymphet jailbait daughter, the mysterious quack doctor etc etc.  The actors playing the film characters also double up as the actors and crew of the film Stine is working on and the fun is seeing how life imitates art and vice-versa.

I had a chance to see the show again in 2008 at the Guildhall Drama School where it was proven that you really do need actors who can sing to make the show a success.  So the news that Donmar Artistic Director Josie Rourke had chosen the show to be the first musical she would direct had me cock-a-hoop: who would be cast and how on earth could they stage this complicated show on such an intimate stage?

The answer was: quite easily actually!  Against a towering backdrop of piled up manuscripts, Robert Jones has designed a show that uses minimal set dressing to conjure the mood required and it is aided immeasurably by Howard Harrison's Noiresque lighting and the witty use of Duncan McLean's video projections.  It was a pleasure to see the show coming to life on that small stage.

The casting I have a bit more trouble with.  Countless plays of the original Broadway cast recording have spoiled me as the double act of Gregg Edelman and James Naughton (who won the Tony Award) as Stine and Stone are matchless, closely followed by the London pairing of Smith and Allam.

I am not sure whether it is symptomatic of the calibre of West End leading men at present but although Hadley Fraser could certainly belt out the last notes of DOUBLE TALK and FUNNY - and clamber like a mountain goat over the vertiginous backdrop - I felt he was too lightweight as Stine and Tam Mutu also seemed to lack the real grit needed for Stone, the tough dick hiding a bruised heart.  I was hoping for Bogart in "The Maltese Falcon" and got George Segal in "The Black Bird". 

I hasten to add that the two theatre groupies who were sitting next to me more than made up for my muted applause for Fraser as they couldn't keep still when he was on stage.  Bless.

Also disappointing was Peter Polycarpou's Buddy Fiddler.  The perfect scene-stealing role, this Fiddler growled rather than roared.  I don't know whether he was playing down to match the size of the stage but this tyrant of the sound stage came across as some guy from the front office.  Where the production did score big however was with the female cast.

Larry Gelbart wrote four excellent roles which give the actresses playing them a real opportunity to show their versatility.  There is Donna, Fiddler's secretary who helps Stine rewrite his script while seducing him over the typewriter, who also doubles as Oolie, Stone's dependable but lovelorn secretary; there is Gabby, Stine's practical editor wife, who doubles as Bobbi, a cabaret torch singer who Stone loved when he was a cop and who vanished after he took the rap for her shooting a man.  

There is Avril Raines, the dumb blonde 'protegée' starlet of Fiddler who knows plenty when it comes to advancing her career who doubles as Mallory Kingsley, a teenage heiress whose unexplained disappearance is solved when she turns up very much alive in Stone's bed; and there is Carla Haywood, Fiddler's none-too-faithful but no-nonsense actress wife who also doubles as the seductively mysterious Alaura Kingsley, wife of a sickly industrialist who might or might not know more than she lets on.

Josie Rourke has the good fortune to be blessed with Rebecca Trehearn as Donna/Oolie, Rosalie Craig as Gabby/Bobbi, Samantha Barks as Avril/Mallory and Katherine Kelly as Carla/Alaura.  Luckily my two favourite songs in the show were wonderfully performed: Samantha Barks turned up the heat as the seductive Mallory without losing Zippel's delicious lyrical double-play in "Lost and Found" and Rebecca Trehearn stopped the show with Oolie/Donna's "You Can Always Count On Me" - her good-natured but worldly-wise performance suggesting Jane Russell at her brunette best.

Cy Coleman and David Zippel's 40s jazz-style score contains so many great songs that should either bounce off the stage like bullets from a .44 or wrap around you like the smoke from a Femme Fatale's cigarette that at times it was frustrating that they were sometimes too plodding in their arrangements.  The innuendo-drenched "Tennis Song" between Stone and Alaura should feel like a bracing rally but here felt like a full 5-set match (with rain delays).

So... there you have it.  Yes there were things I was disappointed with but would I see it again?  In a hot minute.  All they have to do is whistle...

...you know how to whistle don't you Donmar?  You just put your lips together and... blow.