Can’t Buy Me Love at The Salberg, Salisbury Playhouse. Picture: Richard Davenport
Can’t Buy Me Love continues at The Salberg, Salisbury Playhouse until 16 January 2016.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
It’s a neat idea: start your alternate Christmas entertainment for the grown-ups with a round up of pantomime plots.
You thought they were all about men dressed as women and the handsome hero getting the girl, but director Gareth Machin, who devised this year’s cabaret-style show for Salisbury Playhouse, begs to differ.
Most of them are about money and the need to get rich – and so is this show.
Can’t Buy Me Love is all about how wealth – lots of it or lack of it – has been celebrated in song right through from simple nursery rhyme to contemporary pop, hip hop and rap, taking in the Gold Diggers of 1933 and other film and Broadway classics along the way.
Rags to riches mimics the theme of this year’s Playhouse panto Cinderella, just as Machin’s previous two seasonal shows did. Last year’s Mother Goose, inspired a travel-themed globe-trotting musical celebration Come Fly With Me, and before that, London’s Calling referenced that year’s Dick Whittington.
The format is the same: take a handful of talented actor-musicians – this year, Kieran Buckeridge, Christine Holman, Susannah van den Berg and Tomas Wolstenholme do the honours – a series of songs on the same theme, and string them together with a peppering of quotes from across the ages showing how money talks.
And it works extremely well.
It sounds great – Kate Edgar returns to the Playhouse again as musical director and arranger – and looks a million dollars on Alex Marker’s set with its illuminated staircase, giant dice, roulette-wheeled floor and gilded stage.
Buckeridge, who has played pantomime dame in Salisbury’s main house for the last three years, abandons falsies and frocks for lounge suit and proves an accomplished song and dance man with a relaxed style and fine comic timing, especially for Flanders and Swann’s ‘Design For Living’.
Here he is joined by Holman who gets her individual chance to shine in The Divine Comedy’s ‘A Lady of a Certain Age’ and has her Monroe moment with ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’.
Expected choices like ‘Big Spender’ and ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ are included, van den Berg belting out both of these, but so too are the less obvious like Aloe Blacc’s ‘I Need a Dollar’.
The message that threads through the show is a little short on Christmas cheer – money is clearly not going to buy you love, happiness, peace of mind or much else of lasting value, but not having it will make you miserable too. Not sure that’s the message the kids are getting next door in Cinderella…
Barbara Steele
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