Damn Yankees continues at the Landor Theatre, London until 8 November. Picture: Roy Tan
Damn Yankees continues at the Landor Theatre, London until 8 November.
When Damn Yankees landed over here as a 1958 movie version of the award-winnning Broadway musical, they changed the title to ‘What Lola Wants’ to protect the sensibilities of well-bred matrons who might throw up their hands in horror at the sight of the word ‘Damn’ on advertising hoardings.
How times change! Now ‘damn’ is almost as extinct as the dodo but Damn Yankees comes back to life at the Landor in the second London Fringe revival this year – the first at the Brockley Jack Studio in April – of the Richard Adler-Jerry Ross show most celebrated for hit songs ‘Whatever Lola Wants’ and ‘(You Gotta Have) Heart’.
Ross’ early death at the age of 29 a few months after Damn Yankees opened nipped in the bud this highly successful partnership which had wowed Broadway the previous year with The Pajama Game and was being talked about as the natural successor to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Not seen in the West End since a nine-week run at the Adelphi in 1997 when comedian Jerry Lewis took the role of Mr Appleyard, the modern-day Mephistopheles, it now has the very camp and entirely wicked Jonathan D Ellis in a part he was born to play.
His Act II show-stopper ‘Those Were The Good Old Days’ alone is well worth embracing north Clapham for an evening, even on a very wet night, and would be an adornment to the West End.
Don’t let the Brits’ aversion to baseball put you off: Douglass Wallop’s book The Year The Yankees Lost The Pennant (converted for the stage by Wallop and George Abbott) is much more about love than sport.
Will Joe Boyd’s pact with the devil that turns him from paunchy couch-potato baseball addict into home-run-shooting, six-pack-toting Joe Hardy, hero of the down-table Washington Senators, last forever or will love for the wife Meg (Nova Skipp, slightly underpowered even though just a few feet away) he has said goodbye to in the deal triumph in the end over evil, in the shape of Mr Appleyard and his sexy home-wrecking accomplice Lola? It’s no contest, of course, but what fun we have before true love, as ever in American musicals of the 1950s, finds a way.
Many of the 20-strong cast are fresh out of college – and there’s a lot of potential on display – but for Gary Bland, a musical theatre fanatic since the age of 11 but here making his professional musical theatre debut as Boyd at the age of 53, it is a dream come true.
And he looks perfectly at home vocally among players with long West End experience like Ellis and Tony Stansfield, who reprises the part of Senators’ coach Van Buren that he took in the West End in the 1990s and performs ‘Heart’ with relish and perfect timing.
Alex Lodge, just graduated from ArtsEd, is a likeable and tuneful Joe Hardy with a big future, but while the lovely Poppy Tierney, in a daring low-backed number that leaves little to the imagination, acts and dances Lola well, she doesn’t quite nail her big vocal moment with ‘Whatever Lola Wants’, and some of the newcomers are just a little too eager to please.
But it’s great to hear unamplified voices and get so close to the action in the Landor’s tiny space that you can almost smell the greasepaint.
The dancing is a highlight, full of verve and vitality. Robbie O’Reilly’s choreography, making full use of every square inch, has to go down as a triumph of planning and flair, while MD Michael Webborn’s small band make a big impression. The show is brilliantly dressed (and undressed) and it all goes with a terrific swing under Landor house director Robert McWhir.
It’s a musical with a big heart and if you come away not feeling a good deal better than when you arrived, you must have a heart as stony as the devil himself.
Jeremy Chapman
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