Show Musical Arts That Looks Just Like Hannah Johnkamen
Theater Review
'Viva!' but Peradventure Not Forever
LONDON — Hither'due south 1 of the more than polite questions that occurred to me midway through "Viva Forever!," the testify scored to the dorsum catalog of the Spice Girls that brought a limp year for new musicals (that's to say, 2012) to a sputtering halt: When is the production actually going to commencement?
To be sure, the director Paul Garrington's staging had already been creaking forth for an hour or and then by the time the query popped into my head. Just whereas some misbegotten shows practice a cocky-axiomatic crash-and-burn — or announce their sick-advised intentions with perverse gusto — "Viva Forever!" on opening night arrived at the halfway betoken equally if everyone involved were, figuratively speaking, still waiting in the wings.
Information technology wasn't until curtain down that it became credible that here was no ballsy "so-bad-information technology'southward-expert" clunker on the order of "Which Witch" or "King," to cite two flop musicals of old that in their twenty-four hour period too played the Piccadilly Theatre. Instead, this thematic follow-upwardly to "Mamma Mia!," the ongoing Abba-fueled phenomenon with which "Viva Forever!" shares several creative personnel, starting with the producer Judy Craymer, is in essence a small, distressing prove trapped inside the inevitably bludgeoning corporeality of hype.
Not that the Spice Girls themselves characteristic alive in the show in whatever way. Yeah, the glammed-up gals were on mitt at the pre-Christmas premiere and took to the stage at the close of the performance for a photo opportunity marked out by the apparently unyielding sullenness of Posh Spice (aka Victoria Beckham), who seemed to regard her one-time colleagues with the level of enthusiasm Macbeth reserves for the ghost of Banquo.
But for all the gathering hash out fourth dimension about a piece that has been some while in the making (and, in fact, shed an initial director, the Tony-winning Marianne Elliott, very early on), the finished product seems bewilderingly inchoate. It's as if all involved never got beyond the phase of thrashing out ideas on a napkin over a drink or two.
Every bit information technology happens, alcohol might aid soften resistance to a narrative that comes with its ain degree of leglessness, to co-opt a wonderful British synonym for the state of inebriation in which one or another of the characters in "Viva Forever!" at various points find themselves.
Those familiar with "Mamma Mia!," which after the success not just of the stage musical only of its 2008 moving picture accommodation must be sizable swaths of the globe, will recognize this show'south central dynamic. Hither once again is a unmarried female parent locked in tetchy if somewhen loving combat with her daughter, both of whom volition impart easily digested life lessons on the way to the preordained megamix finale.
Information technology helps, I suppose, that the pop ballad "Mama" is among the 20-plus Spice Girls numbers folded with varying degrees of finesse into Jennifer Saunders'due south surprisingly half-hearted script. But whereas "Mamma Mia!" takes place on a Greek island, thereby allowing for glimpses of sun and sea to go with an often scantily clad ensemble, "Viva Forever!" shifts betwixt a houseboat in Camden Town in northward London and the shallower byways of the reality-television manufacture.
Viva (Hannah-Jane Kamen), you have to empathize, likes solidarity and girl power as much as the side by side fame-happy 19-year-one-time, but what is she to practise when offered the opportunity to break away from her girl-grouping chums and go it alone, egged on by the vampy talent show gauge, Simone, who becomes her mentor?
In that senior role, the dark-eyed Sally Dexter offers a caricature of a caricature, though "Viva Forever!" on Ms. Dexter's résumé surely widens a breadth of work that includes the Regal Shakespeare Company and the original cast of the Patrick Marber play, "Closer."
Tension on the habitation front accompanies the set up-to over the fact that Viva is adopted betwixt the questing young woman and her mother Lauren, a fun-loving soul played by Emerge Ann Triplett with an easeful charm noticeably defective elsewhere.
While offer a vague parallel to the parentage issues that crop upward in "Mamma Mia!," the malaise raised past the specter of Viva'south biological female parent is pretty much dropped earlier it has even begun in a second human action that takes us to Espana — palm trees, hooray! — and then back to England, with everyone that little bit wiser. And hoarser.
While remarking upon the failure of the whole, cultural arbiters may ponder the significance of "Viva Forever!" in smaller ways, also. I'm non entirely sure what to make of the weird start-act jab in the direction of Whitney Houston insomuch as this show opened within a week of "The Bodyguard," the competing West Terminate musical based on the 1992 Houston/Kevin Costner movie.
Social media obsessives, meanwhile, tin thrill to the graphic symbol of Minty (Hatty Preston), Simone'southward poshly spoken personal banana, who talks in Tweets, punctuating multiple lines with "hashtag," that distinctive buzzword for our time. (She besides gets a dreadful "Downton Abbey" joke that should be discarded, fast.) More puzzling is the disability of Ms. Saunders, as writer of the book, to translate the amiable chaos of her "Absolutely Fabled" years into something that makes sense in the here and now.
On the other manus, it'south possible that this musical's demographic won't give a fig near any of the to a higher place every bit they await "Headlines," "Spice Up Your Life" and "Wannabe," to name just a few of the Spice Girls standards that become duly trotted out.
In that location's besides an equivalent to the Havana sequence in "Guys and Dolls" for those whose musical theater memories go back somewhat further than the cultural commodification that "Viva Forever!" condemns. And, let'due south be honest, celebrates, besides.
Thanks, meanwhile, and thank you once again for the ii Alan Bennett one-acts that snuck into the National Theatre lineup just before the end of the year, offering both a bracing cosmetic to the same author's full-length (and severely disappointing) "People" and, on their own terms, two of the most satisfying theater pieces in boondocks.
"Hymn," directed by Nadia Fall, revisits a piece first seen in 2001 in which the playwright looks dorsum on his own musical past, both as a hapless would-be violinist and as an eager student in the repertoire of such defining British composers as Elgar, Delius and Butterworth. (And who had clocked before seeing this thirty-minute piece that carthorse was an anagram for orchestra?)
The more recent, and substantial, "Cocktail Sticks" under Nicholas Hytner'south deeply engaged management finds Mr. Bennett looking back with a mixture of rue, regret and constant love on his parents, on his mode toward the realization that "you don't put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there." Alex Jennings plays Mr. Bennett in both plays, the younger man communicable precisely the tweedy bemusement of the writer (and sometime histrion) who is non far off 80.
The plays can exist seen every bit a pair on occasional Sundays or as divide early-evening entertainments. Nevertheless you cull to view them, they offering Mr. Bennett in cogitating mode at his very best.
Viva Forever! Directed by Paul Garrington. Piccadilly Theatre. Open-ended run.
Hymn. Directed past Nadia Fall. National Theatre/Lyttelton. Through March 17.
Cocktail Sticks. Directed past Nicholas Hytner. National Theatre/Lyttelton. Through March 30.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/arts/09iht-lon09.html
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