Well-Strung and Varla Jean Merman

Varla Jean Merman in The Book of Merman. Picture: Rex Bonomelli

Well-Strung (The Singing String Quartet) and Varla Jean Merman in The Book of Merman at the Leicester Square Theatre, London.

There won’t be many places in London where you can spend a more entertaining hour – with your clothes on, anyway – than with Well-Strung, a cute name for four good-looking young Americans who between them play two violins, a viola and a cello, sing well and are genuinely witty with it.

Mixing the classic works of Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach and Dvorak with the up-to-date pop of Adele, Taylor Swift, Ke$ha, Lady Gaga and Jessie J, but all the time putting their own spin on everything, has probably been done before, but rarely as fluently or as charmingly.

The highlights are a hilarious version of Swift’s terrific ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ and a foot-tapping take on Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’. But there isn’t a moment which does not please or when the attention wanders.

It is a bit of a cheat to call it musical theatre, except these guys are extremely musical and they are playing in a theatre, albeit a fairly sparsely populated one, and it is to be hoped the audience turns out in force for the rest of their first London gig.

Their names – because we shall surely hear a lot more of them – are Edmund Bagnell and Christopher Marchant (violins), Trevor Wadleigh (viola) and Daniel Shevlin (cello). Wadleigh is the one who assumes the camp voice and gets the laughs in a well-rehearsed and beautifully choreographed programme, for which director Donna Drake (who played Trisha in the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line in 1975 and wrote some of the material along with Jeffery Roberson and Mark Cortale) can take much credit.

In his alter ego of the outrageous Varla Jean Merman, the supposed love-child of Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman, Roberson is responsible for the first half of this double-bill, and comedy fans with long memories may recall his stints at the Soho Theatre in 2002 and the following year.

A naughty-but-nice drag artist with all the innuendo and double entendres you might expect, he/she is in fine voice with a version of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Children Will Listen’ over a gag about gay dads who adopt. And there are wicked spoofs on Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera Sera’, Liza Minnelli, The Sound of Music and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, along with quickfire original material and glitzy wardrobe changes.

Not all of it hits the target, some jokes are more suited to an American audience, and the act tails away from a lickety-spit start to a not-very-funny but definitely rude ‘Mayonnaise’ and a weak finale called ‘Pearl Necklace’.

But nobody gets to play 54 Below, Manhattan’s plush supper club replacement for the much-missed Oak Room at the Algonquin, unless they have talent, and that’s where Varla Jean is heading next week (29–30 September).

Jeremy Chapman

www.leicestersquaretheatre.com