TELL ME ON A SUNDAY
TELL ME ON A SUNDAY: Music Andrew Lloyd Webber, Lyrics Don Black
Additional Material Jackie Clune
Performed by Marti Webb
Review: Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, Rod Dungate 12 October 2004
Running Time: 1h 55m
More info: www.tellmeonasunday.com
Intimate, moving when it needs to be, disarmingly natural.The main thing about this one-woman musical is that it's friendly not cosy, friendly. Here's this not-quite-so-young English woman who leaves her drinking husband and moves to New York to make a new life for herself.
She's on the search for love and meets a number of blokes and has a good time with them but they eventually turn out to be less than the ideal partner. Whereas the show could lead to a happy, coupling ending and to the dreaded sentimentality it doesn't. At the end of the show the not-quite-so-young woman is still single, probably a lot wiser, but will make the same mistakes or are they mistakes? - again. We hope her search will be successful, but we understand, through Marti Webb's perfectly pitched performance, that the ups must be enjoyed and valued and the downs are part of the picture. Life is complicated but rich if you open yourself up to its possibilities.
SUNDAY is entirely sung-through, so highly artificial. But Webb brings a disarming directness and naturalness to her performance that welcomes you into the show. You feel that you're sitting with her in her NY flat (oops, sorry, apartment) and she's talking to you over a coffee. Her tone and the production tone merge perfectly for our enjoyment. And another thing . . . (and the credit here must go both the Webb's performing skills and the skills of composer and lyricist Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black) there is not a single, solitary word you miss.
No songs stand out as 'the big number', even though a version of TAKE THAT LOOK OFF YOUR FACE is incorporated. Personally I see this as an advantage since we watch a drama not a vehicle for a song. Webb displays genuine pathos ('Don't leave in silence' she pleads at the end of the one of her affairs) as well as humour (I'M VERY YOU as she befriends the daughter of a married man she's hooked up with.) I like, too, the moments when we return to her letters home to Mum and friend Jane; they are comforting still points on the shifting journey.
Performed by Marti Webb
Production Design: Rob Howell
Lighting Design: Huh Vanstone
Sound Design: Mick Potter
Musical Director: Robert Chalmers
Directed by: Christopher Luscombe
Original Production directed by: Matthew Warchus
2004-10-14 11:32:43