Picture: Mark Senior
Blitz! continues at the Union Theatre, London until 7 March 2020.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
For the second leg of their VE Day 75th anniversary trilogy, the Union has dusted down Lionel Bart’s Blitz! which ran alongside the same composer’s iconic Oliver! in the West End in 1962 and given a rarely-heard musical the kiss of life.
Blitz! – don’t forget the exclamation mark Bart also stuck on Oliver! and went double for on his gigantic flop Twang!! – did well, running for 568 performances at the Adelphi, but this is its first professional revival for 20 years.
I was only three when the Second World War ended but grew up with my mother telling me all about the Blitz, the aerial bombings of Britain’s blacked-out cities, and how the Germans had taken away her youth. She was married and pregnant at 18 with a husband posted abroad playing his part in beating Herr Hitler.
She wouldn’t have seen the funny side of Bart’s terrific ‘Who’s This Geezer Hitler?’ and my Jewish father was so taken aback when told I was marrying a German that they wouldn’t come to my 1968 wedding in Gottingen, even though they were offered a free trip.
So Blitz! is a nostalgic trip for me, full of East End warmth and family spirit as well as the inevitable Jews versus Gentiles friction set to one side for the duration, often reluctantly, for the common good.
This is what Bart’s rich story conveys, Jewish matriarch Mrs Blitztein with her pickled herring stall on Petticoat Lane constantly at odds with her Cockney fruit-and-veg neighbour Alf Locke, a First World War veteran now an ARP warden.
Locke’s sensitive soldier son Georgie falls head over heels for Mrs Blitztein’s daughter Carol in a Romeo-and-Juliet romance. Carol’s Jack-the-Lad brother Harry (Robbie McArtney) is a rogue with black market leanings and a wandering eye for women, even the posh, married Joyce (Eleanor Sandars) who supplants the still-keen Cissie (Anna Robertson, feisty and excellent) in his affections, at least temporarily.
How these relationships pan out, even the unlikely one between Blitztein and sworn enemy Locke, would require a spoiler alert but there’s a wedding, lots of good songs, and plenty of joyous dancing with the cast of 17, often on the small stage all at once, somehow managing not to bump into one another. Definitely an A+ for the wholehearted cast and quite an achievement by choreographer Daniel Maguire.
Bart even wrote ‘Day After Tomorrow’ especially for Forces’ Sweetheart Vera Lynn to sing on the wireless and pinched one of Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches, suitably intoned by James Horne, who played belligerent grandad Locke and gave such a memorable Dr Arnold in the first VE Day play, Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
The original Blitz! boasted a complex, spectacular and expensive set by Sean Kenny as it was expected to run forever as Oliver! did. But the far less flashy one put together by director Phil Willmott and designer Reuben Speed, with most of the shelter action based claustrophobically on the platform of (the mythical) Petticoat Lane underground station and in Shoreditch’s rat-run alleyways is inspired.
For all its feel-good appeal, Blitz! failed to be an international success, partly because it did not have songs of the evergreen quality of ‘I’d Do Anything’, ‘Consider Yourself’ and ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ that made Oliver! so exportable to Broadway and partly because it was seen as being too London-specific to travel well.
But Bart, himself an East Ender from Stepney, always produced tunes worth listening to even though he could not read or write music and there is much to admire. ‘Opposites’, a duet between lovebirds Carol (Caitlin Anderson) and Georgie (Connor Carson), reflecting that coming from different backgrounds makes them more suited rather than less, is good enough to be a cabaret standard and well worth hearing.
The children’s chorus ‘We’re Going to the Country’ is winningly performed, Carol’s ‘Far Away’ where she’s pining for her six-month absent Georgie was a minor hit for Shirley Bassey (reached No. 24 in the charts), and ‘Is There Going to Be a Wedding?’ is a rousing ensemble number full of community spirit.
Even Mrs Blitztein’s silly ‘Bake a Cake’ as the answer to winning a world war is fun in the safe hands of Jessica Martin who is the heart and soul of the show, along with Michael Martin as her spirited sparring partner. Her wedding speech brings a tear to the eye.
The moments of anti-semitism in the 58-year-old script are not brushed out or softened and this revival comes all the better for that.
Corinna Marlowe, Vicki Mason, Danniella Schindler, James Georgiou, Beaux Harris, Charlotte Bradley, Eleanor Griffiths, Jack Slatter, Stephen Hayward and Lorne Taylor all have their moments in an enthusiastic supporting cast.
Musical director Rosa Lennox and her three cohorts Jack Summerfield and actor-musos Michael Martin and Anna Robertson handle a packed score with flair while sound and lighting men Ralph Warman and Harvey Nowak-Green give bombs and blackouts the full treatment.
Once again a programme that fails to find space for a song list and who sings them, surely a key component of what the audience pays £3 for, is irritating. Thank goodness for Google!
The final part of Willmott’s Essential Classics season, Peace in Our Time, one of Noel Coward’s later and least successful plays in which he imagines a Britain if Hitler had won, follows Blitz! directly next month (11 March to 4 April).
Jeremy Chapman
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