Singin’ in the Rain – Upstairs at the Gatehouse

Singin’ in the Rain continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 25 January.

Although everybody remembers Gene Kelly’s magical dancing-in-rain, splashing-in-puddles, getting-soaked routine from the timeless 1952 Hollywood movie, it was London that eventually translated Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s screenplay into a stage musical when Tommy Steele directed and starred in it at the Palladium in the 1980s.

It ran for well over two years then as a vehicle for one-time pop idol Steele to demonstrate his triple-threat versatility and there have been several West End revivals since, the latest coming with the Chichester Festival Theatre version that lasted until mid-2013.

And here it is again as the Gatehouse’s Christmas show, sending everybody out into a cold December night with a warm glow and feeling very much more capable of dealing with the rigorous week’s festivities ahead than they did a couple of hours earlier.

And although the upper deck of the Gatehouse pub could not hope to replicate the sheer volume of water expended on the film or indeed at the Palladium (where such was the noise of the rain effect and the fear of it causing short-circuiting microphones that Steele had to mime the title song to a tape recording), director John Plews and water expert Alasdair Elliot’s pared-down version does the job perfectly well.

And while it is an incredibly silly story, it does highlight what the end of the silent-movie era in the 1920s meant to actors with voices like corncrakes and accents like New Jersey fishwives. Unless they mastered the ‘new cinema’ they were toast.

Lina, played with a wonderful disregard for the English language by Thea Jo Wolfe, is based on silent star Norma Talmadge, whose career predictably nosedived once she had to open her mouth for anything other than a kiss.

Simon Adkins is all Hollywood hunk as the Gene Kelly lead Don Lockwood, who manages to adapt to the new screen techniques. He tap-dances up a storm, as does his love interest Frankie Jenna as the posher, stage-trained Kathy Selden, who can talk the talk unlike poor Lina and is destined to take over as Monumental Studios’ new leading lady.

Jenna’s dancing lit up the Menier stage in a small role in Candide at this time last year and here she confirms in a much bigger part that she deserves to be better known than she is.

This is a show that involves custard-pie slapstick and a fair bit of comedy business that could go violently wrong unless painstakingly rehearsed, and the cast’s slick timing, not least the engaging Paul Harwood as Don’s best friend Cosmo in the comedy routines ‘Make ’Em Laugh’, ‘Moses Supposes’ and ‘Good Morning’, is a joy to witness.

In truth, and it is not at all the director’s fault, Singin’ in the Rain is not the best-balanced show ever written because the best songs and most of the humour are contained in Act I and it climaxes too soon.

Anything coming after the big umbrella-and-tap showstopper – Adkins takes his drenching with style – that brings the first half to such a wonderfully wet climax is always likely to be a letdown.

That is how it works out and even though the director has cunningly switched ‘Beautiful Girls’ to beef up the Act II action, the best numbers (music: Nacio Herb Brown; lyrics: Arthur Freed), have gone by then, apart from Jenna’s ballad ‘Would You?’ and repeats of ‘You Are My Lucky Star’ and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.

Samuel Haughton, Nick Barclay, Emily Wigley, Lindsay Atherton and Vicky Longland are fine in smaller roles, the choreography by Chris Whittaker makes thrilling use of the unusual space, and the seven-strong band under MD Matt Ramplin is right in step with some tricksy material.

Special mention for the movie inserts in which we see the vehicles for silent stars Don and Lina as they try to make the transition to the talkies. They are fiendishly clever and extremely funny and it’s a show into which a lot of thought and hard slogging hours have been put.

A word of warning though: you are probably better off in the third row than the first when the taps are turned on!

Jeremy Chapman

www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com