Beauty and the Beast: A Musical Parody continues at the King’s Head Theatre, London until 17 November 2018.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Fat Rascal’s production of Beauty and the Beast is billed as a musical parody, and parody it certainly does. With a vengeance. It might be more accurate to bill it as a bawdy pantomime for adults.
The performances are physical, slapstick, inventive. Allie Munro in particular, with her dance background, creates a different body language for each of her characters and is a great comic performer.
Devised by the company, there is no director credit, just associate director Cat Robey who deploys the cast of five with great skill. There are numerous exits and entrances wielding endless props and quick costume changes.
Choreography by Jed Berry is fun, and the cast attack it with glee, making up with enthusiasm what they lack in prowess. Sadly, for what is billed as a musical, they also lack the singing voices one might expect, apart from Jamie Mawson as Beau. It all has the air of an undergraduate show, though I must add that the age 30ish audience lapped it up and some were even on their feet at the end.
The story of Beauty and her Beast is reversed, with a female beast. All the characters in the fairy tale are there, often represented by the props they hold, a teapot, a clock. Funny accents and voices play the field, and it goes at a heck of a pace.
Music by James Ringer-beck and book and lyrics by Robyn Grant and Daniel Elliot are tuneful and rhythmic, but songs like ‘Have a Brunch’, fun as they are, don’t actually further the plot as in the best-written musicals but seem grafted on.
The book is full of innuendo. Sex of all persuasions abounds, jokes, visual and verbal. The stated attempt to address the issue of being a woman who doesn’t conform to stereotypical images of attractiveness and femininity gets lip service and rather lost in the blare of it all.
It’s all great fun but sadly lacks emotional involvement. The best slapstick always has an emotional core and until the last ten minutes or so, it’s something this piece misses out on. With better singing and a few rewrites, it might have been a real contender.
Leon Ferguson
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