Beautiful and Damned.
London
BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
by Kit Hesketh-Harvey Music & Lyrics by Roger Cook and Les Reed Additional material Laurence Myers
Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Ave
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 890 1107
Review: Kim Durham, May 12
Good cast - shame about the show.
OK. Firstly some positives. The costumes are great. There are a couple of impressively high energy dance routines. In fact, the cast throughout perform heroically and, in themselves, are far from disgraced. In Helen Anker's Zelda, Beautiful and Damned boasts a genuinely stellar performance.
The problem is, both she and the rest of the cast are plowing through mush. The book, a biographic flick through the lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, falls below the standard of the soapiest TV biopic. This would be bad enough. What sinks Beautiful and Damned at times to the truly jaw-dropping level of Springtime for Hitler is the astonishing banality of its music and lyrics. Spurred to become a successful writer through his love for Zelda, Michael Praed's Scott sings: Words will flow like stars in the sky above./ They'll shine forever with undeniable love.
Lyrics like these - and there are plenty more equally risible couplets are accompanied by a succession of tunes of crushing melodic predictability.
In the second half, the relentless sentimentality of these becomes alarmingly at odds with what little grit there is in the story and, in the end, seems genuinely offensive. While Kit Hesketh Harvey's book at least hints that Zelda may have been a complex woman with ambitions beyond being simply Scott's muse, songwriters Les Reed and Roger Cook insist that: Being a woman in love with a man,/ Somehow your life's complete only when he's around.
It's indicative that when the company send up a tacky Hollywood musical treatment of a Scott Fitzgerald script the joke falls flat. Hollywood's pastiched dumbing down is no dumber than the rest of this show.
Given that it's way beyond redemption, all the more reason to praise the blameless company. Helen Anker, as well as being a great hoofer, does manage to suggest a Zelda who, even at her most exuberant, is teetering on the edge. Michael Praed gamely sings with all the conviction he can muster and carries off Scott with a degree of diffident charm. The rest of the cast all have their moments enough to show that they deserve something better.
Cast: Michael Praed, Helen Anker, David Burt, Susannah Fellows, Phillip Aiden, Valerie Cutko, Heather Douglas, Candice Evans, Nicola Filshie, Katie Foster-Barnes, Loren Geeting, Jo Gibb, Jacqui Jameson, Jolyon James, Jane Lucas, Amber Neale, Stuart Nurse, Jake Samuels, Craig Scott, Djalenga Scott, Spencer Stafford, Ben Tribe.
Director/Choreographer: Craig Revel Horwood
Designer/Costume: Christopher Woods
Lighting: Nick Richings
2004-05-14 01:09:58