A Spoonful of Sherman – Greenwich Theatre and Touring

Picture: Matt Martin

A Spoonful of Sherman continues at the Greenwich Theatre, London until 30 March 2018, and then tours until 3 June 2018.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

A musical about musicals could very easily be self-conscious and awkward and it’s certainly a high risk idea. In the hands of the Sherman family, alive and sadly no longer with us, it works very well against all the odds, sitting somewhere between a revue and a jukebox musical.

Musician and song writer Al Sherman was the father of Richard M and Robert B Sherman, famously responsible for the Mary Poppins songs, several Jungle Book numbers, Winnie the Pooh and many more.

Robert’s son Robert J did well with his own show Lovebirds in Edinburgh and has written A Spoonful of Sherman to tell his family’s story. This new version has been developed from an earlier show which used Sherman himself as narrator.

Its success is largely down to accomplished directing and choreography by Stewart Nicholls and a highly talented cast of five including two actor-musicians who play a pair of on-stage pianos.

Those instruments, which are on castors, are a central set item frequently moved and reconfigured even while one of other of the pianists is seated, playing on the mini platform attached to the piano. The action includes jumping on and off them, sliding between them, standing behind them and sitting on top of them.

The structure and style are unusual and take a bit of adjusting to at the beginning. The energetic cast shares verbal narration of the story which is hooked together by Sherman songs across three generations. Situations are never acted out and we don’t  get to know any of the Shermans as people.

Jenna Innes, trained at the MTA and in her first year of professional work, is outstanding. She has a magnificent singing voice and oodles of cheerful charm as well as being very versatile. Definitely one to watch.

There’s splendid work from Glen Facey too. Petite and, apparently made of rubber, he does back flips and walks on his hands. He also sings well and has an engaging cheeky chappy manner in the style of Tommy Steele or Charlie Stemp.

Facey’s Lovebirds number with Innes is a tour de force of slick comedy and fine singing. So are his simian antics in ‘I Wan’na Be Like You’.

Sophie-Louise Dann brings auburn good humour and maturity to the mix. Several of her numbers require jazz vocal skills and she sings them with immaculate breath control, especially in ‘The Age of Not Believing’.

Ben Stock – musical director for this show – is a fine pianist who is very amusing when he pops out from behind his playing. His Aristocats number is great fun, for example.

And there’s some fine lyrical bass singing from Mark Read as well as lots of skilled piano accompaniment.

This show also includes several excellent a cappella moments in which the cast give us, for example, quartet work.

A Spoonful of Sherman packs “the songbook of our childhood” with masses of charm and nostalgia. It really is a refreshing change to see a show in which there isn’t  a single four letter word, no one has sex on stage and no one cries or dies – a welcome antidote to all the awfulness of the real world perhaps.

Susan Elkin

Readers may also be interested in:

‘Suddenly there was a buzz’: Robbie Sherman chats about the success of A Spoonful of Sherman – INTERVIEW