Girl in a Crisis – Live At Zédel

Girl in a Crisis at Live At Zédel, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Putting your talent right upfront in an intimate venue like the lush Crazy Coqs and before an almost pin-dropping quietly attentive audience is anything but easy.

Plenty of credit then goes to Lorna Want whose manic, emotional and multi-faceted solo role as Flic, a Girl in a Crisis, displays just how versatile a performer she is.

You don’t win Olivier awards for nothing, so it’s no surprise that Want breezes through a whole gamut of emotions as she finds and loses love, joins a dating agency, sits forlornly at a restaurant table for one and even her beloved pet, Miss Fluffington, goes to the great cattery in the sky.

With music and lyrics by Andrew Fisher and directed impressively tightly by Simon Greiff, the 60 minutes fly by, the audience taken on a whistle-stop autobiographical tour de farce as a young, out-of-work actress faces a kind of early mid-life meltdown. 

Set in 1965, she’s 29 years old and wondering whether you can still be flirty at 30. Time is running out and her biological clock is winding her up, though she finds some semblance of solace in classic movie moments, quoting them throughout.

If anything the drama is too manic too much of the time and it is way more effective when Want’s character goes into slower reflective and consequently funnier mode, like during ‘Second Base’, sung when she’s on the cusp of amorous advances with her new found love. “We’ve got to second base and I think we’re going for third!” she purrs, almost as loudly as Miss Fluffington.

‘Moment of Truth’ is another fine song, as finding out she’s been deceived, breaks down crying. The show’s title song, one of a few reprised numbers, was recently shortlisted for the Stiles & Drewe New Song Prize.

The libretto cites no less than 29 set pieces crammed into the hour and that’s an achievement almost worthy of an Olivier Award in itself.

The underlining problem is that, Want’s feisty, energetic and assured performance aside, much of the sentiment expressed in song just seems a little familiar. In short, it’s all a bit Bridget Jones’s Diary.

But, in the final analysis, there’s really nothing wrong with that. And, if a West End musical of the hugely popular film series ever does get off the ground, then its producers could do far worse than consult creatively with Fisher and Greiff. With Want, they’ve got a ready-made leading lady too. Here’s looking at you Lorna!

Derek Smith