THEATRE Green light


Shrek: The Musical THEATRE ROYAL DRURY LANE, LONDON


nce, Broadway composers in search of subject matter for new musicals would turn to the bookshelves for inspiration: Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, South Pacific and Carousel were all based on novellas or play-texts. These days, the equivalent source of stories seems to be the DVD cupboard. The current lists of West End and Broadway musi- cals could be mistaken for the schedule at a film festival, with a song-and-dance version of Catch Me If You Can having just opened in New York and a musical adaptation of Ghost soon opening in London. Before that, we have Shrek: The Musical, a UK staging of a recent Broadway semi- hit (it lasted only a year) adapted from the 2001 first instalment of a franchise that now runs to four animated movies based on William Steig’s children’s books about an alarming-looking but charming-sounding ogre. I arrived at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with low expectations. It is depressing that movies seem to have become the only basis for new musicals, but the aim is to turn what is already a commercial hit in one form into a commercial hit in another. In publishing terms, the movie is the hardback and the musical the paperback.


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Shrek: high-class panto arrives early So the only real justification for the musical


version of Shrek would be to achieve action sequences that exploit theatrical possibilities unavailable on screen. And Jason Moore and Rob Ashford’s staging does accomplish this goal, especially in the character of Shrek’s enemy Lord Farquaad, diminutive dictator of the land of Far Far Away. There’s no great difficulty in producing a cinematic cartoon of a very small man but, on stage, Nigel Harman has to spend the whole show on his knees, with a pair of tiny fake legs hanging from the hem of his robes, which he uses in some brilliant comic choreography. It is also fairly easy on screen to switch


Princess Fiona between her human and ogre faces or to make a dragon fly but these trans- formations and elevations require considerable ingenuity in the theatre and are brought off with great panache: Amanda Holden changes nature in front of our eyes and the dragon


OPERA Idyll pleasures


Il Turco in Italia GARSINGTON OPERA, WORMSLEY, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE


frivolity, a genial load of “words and music signifying – nothing”, as Tom Lehrer said of Gilbert and Sullivan. And it certainly wears lightly whatever concerns it might have in a confection of easy charm, delicacy and wit. Nonetheless (as usual with Rossini) there is a happy undermining of pretty much every- thing, an unpacking of dramatic conventions which are scrutinised and then laughingly junked in favour of a more jaded version of reality which embraces sincerity, ridicules it, draws a flippant moral, exposes and then for- gives human fickleness. It’s a variation on the “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” theme: love is proper to humans, who are prone to err, but error strengthens love. Garsington Opera, after 21 years at a lovely


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Jacobean manor house, has moved a few miles nearer London to Mark Getty’s fabulous


ost people probably think of Rossini’s 1814 opera as some kind of apogee of


Wormsley estate perched on top of the Chiltern escarpment. It’s an absolute idyll, the amazingly sophisticated temporary theatre with its glass windows floating above the deer park. The theatre references the old open- sided makeshift construction with glass walls looking on to a formal garden, and the audi- torium is airy, elegant and has a crystalline acoustic – as good a place as you could imagine to hear David Parry’s fast, feathery, virtuosic but never frantic conducting of this heavenly meringue of a score. Rossini’s sheer vitality and rhythmic genius is the thing, of course. He controls the pacing of scenes – and time itself – with a touch you never notice. On top of and analogous to that, Il Turco proposes another level of control, as “the Poet”, a librettist with writer’s block, watches the ridiculous events unfold with unconcealed glee and convinces himself that it is he who is directing things for the purposes of his next blockbuster; but he, too, is given a lesson in the improbability of fate. Director Martin Duncan wafts the thing along with the same pretended spirit of undemanding entertainment, packing the show with gags, movement and visual style (with much ingen- ious help from designer Francis O’Connor, who sets the thing in a quotation-marked 1950s Naples) that homages every sitcom trope available while remaining actually


swoops through the auditorium above our heads. Indeed, some of the puppetry matches that to be seen in the National Theatre’s War Horse, which just dominated the Tony awards on Broadway.


And, while Richard Blackwood as Donkey fails to escape from the shadow of Eddie Murphy’s brilliant interpretation in the films, Nigel Lindsay in the title role impressively brings vocal and emotional nuance to his per- formance despite being constrained by a vast green fat suit and face mask. The major weakness, as is depressingly


often the case in modern musicals, is the music. The one show-stopper is “I’m A Believer”, written by Neil Diamond for the Monkees rather than an ogre and a donkey, although he curiously gets no credit in the programme. The 18 numbers written specially for this show – by composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist David Lindsay-Abaire – are considerably less memorable. However, Lindsay-Abaire – an accom- plished playwright – shows good judgement in where to transport, cut and expand the movie narrative and provides sharp spoken dialogue, at various levels of innocence, which confirm the general sense of a very high-class pantomime having arrived early in the year. Although theatrical purists will regret yet


another example of a new musical that flourishes despite its songs, rather than because of them, a production which I had regarded in advance as pointless turns out, through the charm of its performances and ingenuity of its staging, to merit at least seven points out of 10. Mark Lawson


funny; it’s a deft, expert piece of work bril- liantly carried out by a young and sparky cast. The star is Rebecca Nelsen’s Fiorilla, man- aging to make this inconstant wife both slatternly and delightful, and singing Rossini’s nearly impossible roulades with extreme accu- racy and style: the last 20 minutes of Act 1, where she first tries to seduce Selim the Turk, then squabbles with the husband who bursts in, and finally winds up in a catfight with Selim’s ex, is an amazingly sustained perform- ance. And at the very end of the opera she is allowed five minutes’ genuine repentance to soften hubby’s heart and bring down the cur- tain on a very human scene of people settling for their humdrum old loves and lives. And nobody else lets the side down, from


Mark Stone’s gloating Poet to Geoffrey Dolton’s hag-ridden husband, Quirijn de Lang as the smooth Selim, Victoria Simmonds as the Gypsy girl he really loves and David Alegret as Fiorilla’s “official” fancy-man. Rossini spices his score with quotations from Don Giovanni and Così fan Tutte, as if to emphasise how very far we have travelled in the 25 years since they were composed, from revolution to a weary though not unhappy acceptance of the status quo ante. Written on the eve of the Congress of Vienna, Il Turco is the signature tune for slightly unwilling reactionary cynics everywhere. Robert Thicknesse


25 June 2011 | THE TABLET | 27


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