It wasn't drugs, alcohol or conspicuous consumption. Thankfully, it was a lot cheaper than all of those. It was simply watching a musical.
I was suffering from some crushing romantic blow at university ... now long forgotten ... when my pledge daughter, Kathy Tilden, offered the answer. (Pledge daughters being pre-initiates in a sorority who choose you as their older mentor in the house, and who usually become especially dear friends for life.) It was a Saturday night and we were both without plans. We claimed the sitting room and its big TV, ordered a pizza, and Kathy slipped her copy of Singin' in the Rain into the VCR.
I had, of course, seen clips of the best bits. Like most little girls in the '70s I'd devoured the That's Entertainment film franchise, which included the iconic title number with Gene Kelly stomping in puddles, Donald O'Connor's romp through Make 'em Laugh, and the trio (adding Debbie Reynolds) dancing around the world and over a couch, in Good Morning. The complete film turned out to be two hours of pure happiness, and in all the years since, I've known that if I wanted a jolt of joy, I only needed to watch it again.
Imagine my anticipation, and speed to box office, when the Chichester Festival's highly acclaimed production transferred to the West End's Palace Theatre. Last night was the big outing, shared with London Northwestern sisters, Hillary and Lisa.
Don't assume, just because I'm a rabid fan of the film, that I'd be an automatic advocate of the stage show. I went in with critical expectations, and a deep fear they'd muck with perfection. Nope. I had a smile on my face from the first strains of the overture to the curtain call and, despite the cramped legroom of our discounted front-row balcony seats, could have taken a short break and watched the whole thing again, immediately.
They've done a great job copying the film onto the stage. Clever adaptation gets around the challenges of the too-complicated-for-stage scenes like the flashbacks during Don Lockwood's opening "dignity" speech, Don's spring over a moving trolley car and into plucky heroine Kathy Seldon's convertible, or the lavish montage of early movie musicals. A screen built into the stage offers us views of the films we're watching our characters make, and is instrumental in the final scene. The book is, for the most part, a line-for-line pick up of the film.
The casting is excellent, given the challenge of meeting the original. Adam Cooper as Don Lockwood was a risk, given that he didn't come from a musical theatre background. A former Royal Ballet principal, he is as strong as you'd expect on the dancing and shares Kelly's long, lean, dark good looks. Surprisingly, he can sing, too; a pleasant if not memorable West End tenor. His acting lacks Kelly's charisma and the chemistry between Cooper and his Kathy Seldon couldn't match the original. Cooper's Don Lockwood was a bit too smug, never evoking the fundamently-nice-guy-with-insecurities that Kelly brought to the part. (The Kelly-Reynolds charisma is a testament to great acting, BTW; evidently the 40-year-old, ruthlessly professional Kelly scared the hell out of the 19-year-old Reynolds and once criticised her so severely she retreated beneath a piano for a good cry.)
Scarlett Strallen doesn't quite nail Reynolds' magnificently innocent, chipper and strong American girl, seeming a bit too old and mature. But her singing and acting are fantastic enough for you to fall for her charms quickly. Daniel Crossley's Cosmo Brown is probably closest to the original, providing solid laughs throughout, mixed with dynamic singing and dance.
Accents can often be the toughest challenge when iconic American musicals come to the London stage. This British cast did a nice job, slipping only occasionally. And if Katherine Kingsley's Lena Lamont went a bit too far into cartoon caricature Bronx-speak, it works with the role.
There are a couple of extra songs, presumably to round up the running time of what was quite a short film. The first has Don professing his attraction to Kathy on first meeting, a bit of song and dance to replace the chase/trolley/car scene that didn't translate to stage. The second was a whole added scene that has us watching Lena go through a bit of self doubt as she wonders why people don't rate her. I could have done without this. We don't need character depth; the show works better without giving us empathy for our villainess.
A great improvement to the film, however, was the Broadway Melody sequence. This 12-minute insert to the original film, where the boys imagine a modern dance number for the film they're making, allowed Kelly showed off more sophisticated dance move with Cyd Charisse. (At the time, Reynolds had no dance experience.) It's a gorgeous number, standing admirably on its own as a mini-musical, but it stopped the film's plot trajectory cold. The director wisely keeps it in the stage show to make the most of the music and dance potential, but trims it down.
Another brilliant addition is the whole cast joining a final reprise of Singin' in the Rain as those water jets come back on, dumping more of the 12,000 litres a night of water onto the stage. A good quantity getting splashed into the first few rows. Every musical must end with a big dance number, of course. This one achieves its intent, sending the occupants of those 1,200 sold out seats tap dancing and singing (badly) down Charing Cross road as they spill out of the theatre.
Sixty years after its film debut, Singin' in the Rain is still injecting pure joy into all those who see it. Perhaps, rather than all their other schemes, the government should just send everyone in Britain to see this. The ensuing bolt of optimism might bump us right out of recession.
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