TWANG!! at Union Theatre - when revivals go twong...

From the mid-1990s to the mid 2000s, The Bridewell Theatre just off Fleet Street developed quite a reputation under artistic director Carol Metcalfe for staging musicals that might not get a West End airing.  Using a smattering of well-trusted performers, the productions were a bit basic but it was a good way of seeing shows that otherwise might not be seen.

Since then, that mantle seems to have moved south of the river to, primarily, the Menier Chocolate Factory and, more recently, Southwark Playhouse.  The Union Theatre also stages little-seen musicals but their productions are so bargain-basement, they can be painful to sit through.  Step forward, Lionel Bart's TWANG!!

After the runaway success of OLIVER! in 1960, Lionel Bart's next two musicals were both English-based working-class subjects: BLITZ and MAGGIE MAY which both opened at the Adelphi Theatre in 1962 and 1964 respectively.  His East-End working class roots still appealed to his former FINGS AIN'T WOT THEY USED T'BE collaborator Joan Littlewood and she agreed not only to direct his next musical - a comedy based on the story of Robin Hood - but also to cast regulars from her Stratford East productions such as Howard Goornay, Bob Grant, James Booth and Barbara Windsor.

But Littlewood was soon disenchanted with Bart's TWANG!!; Bart's erratic progress on the show - he also co-wrote the book - was not helped by an increasing addiction to drugs and drink and soon they were at loggerheads, sparking arguments with other members of the creative team.  Meanwhile the cast struggled to breathe life into the characters that changed in daily rewrites, James Booth frustrated that his lead role of Robin Hood had little to do while Barbara Windsor's sexy lady-in-waiting Delphina soon over-shadowed Toni Eden's Maid Marian.

It went from bad to worse: Littlewood walked out on the show and was replaced by the American writer Burt Shevelove who co-directed with Bart.  The show struggled on to it's opening night just before Christmas 1965 to unsurprisingly bad reviews and it closed just over a month later, one of the more famous West End flops.

TWANG!! had a disastrous impact on Bart who had invested his own money into the show - a foolish action he repeated with the 1969 Broadway production of his musical LA STRADA and in 1972 Bart, the most famous British musicals composer of the 1960s, was made bankrupt.  By then he had sold the rights to all his shows, including OLIVER!

And so died TWANG!! apart from an original cast recording.  However in 2008, Bart's estate allowed Julian Woolford, the head of Musical Theatre at Guildford School of Acting, to totally rewrite the book and produce it again at Guildford with extra Bart songs shoe-horned into the score and this is what is presented at the Union Theatre.

I have to report that the curse of TWANG!! is still alive and well.  Woolford's book is a clanging meta-musical, snatches of famous musical numbers are belted out to get a knowing laugh from the peanut gallery but with each one my heart sunk.  It's like FORBIDDEN BROADWAY wedged under a Sherwood Forest bush.

Also - groaningly - there is a heavy gay sensibility going on... oh look Little John fancies Robin, oh look Will Scarlett marries Alan A-Dale.. but it's done with such a clanging "look-at-me, look-at-me - aren't I being Modern?" feel that it nearly turned me homophobic.

The show is directed by Bryan Hodgson and I suspect he sat in the rehearsals and run-throughs too busy laughing at the antics of his cast to actually see that there was more mugging going on than in 1970s New York and rein SOMETHING in.

The cast gallop over a truly ugly set by Justin Williams and Jonny Rust - yes it took two people to make something this fakakte - and as usual, the Union draws it's cast from the wealth of cruise ship entertainers, understudies and other play-as-cast performers that is their usual talent pool.  It was with a heavy heart that as usual at productions like these the audience of family and friends whooped and screamed like they were watching the second coming, or the first going.

I sometimes think I give the Union a bad rap but then I go to a production there and the heart sinks again.  What is annoying is that TWANG!! was no doubt seized upon to revive with the idea that it could all be reduced down to banal camp but where is the brave theatrical soul who will revive Bart's wartime BLITZ - albeit that is a huge undertaking - or his Liverpool docker's musical MAGGIE MAY - two shows, I hasten to add, that have stonking lead roles for women?  Not with this tide I fear.