Landi Oshinowo in I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road at Jermyn Street Theatre, London. Picture: Richard Lakos
I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road at Jermyn Street Theatre, London until 23 July.
Rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
It is a quarter of a century since I first heard Steve Ross sing ‘Old Friend’ at the old Pizza On the Park and fell in love with this beautiful, moving avowal of friendship through thick and thin by long-time confidantes.
And when Ann Hampton Callaway recorded an even more poignant version in 1995 as part of the Sibling Revelry revue she did with sister Liz, I became even more intrigued about the show it came from and keen to see this cabaret masterpiece in context.
Not the ‘Old Friends’ Stephen Sondheim wrote for Merrily We Roll Along but the one Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, two genuine old friends, composed for I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road, the 1978 musical that played Off-Broadway for the best part of three years.
If you don’t know it, let me give you the closing stanza: “But we’ll meet the year we’re 62/and travel the world as old friends do/and tell each other what we’ve been through/how love is rare, life is strange/nothing lasts, people change.”
Surely if the two women concerned could write such a perfect song, one that still brings a tear to the eye whenever I hear it, the show itself must be a humdinger?
Sadly not, although it isn’t for want of trying by its star, Landi Oshinowo, whose ‘Old Friend’ is right up there with the best. Her entire performance is electrifying. Yet today the show, with its preachy feel and dialogue that’s not as witty as it needs to be, seems a bit of a relic.
The women of today are on a roll. They have won the war. We shall shortly have a woman Prime Minister, almost certainly a woman Labour leader, a woman is odds-on to be US President and the most powerful figure in European politics is Angela Merkel.
‘Getting My Act Together’ might have been controversial in its time because it was unofficially the first feminist musical but it no longer has much bite.
Not that lyricist Cryer, who also took the main part of cabaret singer Heather Jones intent in changing her act for her 39th birthday in the original show, wrote it to be a feminist tract.
Her intention, she claimed, was to write about the friendships and loves of her own experience. But critics and public didn’t see it that way.
Set in the 1970s when Women’s Lib was rampant and strong women were emerging from the docility of downtrodden home-makers, it struck a chord, playing for more than a thousand performances.
In 1981 it turned up in the West End at the Apollo with Diane Langton as Heather and Ben Cross as her manager Joe, but has vanished into the vaults since and this revival, directed by Matthew Gould, at the 70-seater Jermyn Street Theatre is its first UK appearance for 35 years.
The rest of the songs – there are ten in this 90-minute one-acter – are decent enough but only ‘Old Friend’ has endured.
David Gibbons, as the young guitarist in Heather’s band unexpectedly stating his love for the older woman, makes the most of ‘In a Simple Way I Love You’ (ironically the type of lovey-dovey ballad Heather wants to bin from her new act).
‘Miss America’, alluding to the vacuity of beauty contests, makes its point but this is virtually a one-woman show and how lucky they are to have the powerhouse Oshinowo to drive it along.
Even she cannot disguise the thinness of some of the material and that’s probably why the show is little remembered or performed these days. And why other Cryer-Ford collaborations are forgotten.
Nicolas Colicos has a couple of good scenes as the manager with marital problems who’s getting the push, but Heather’s friends, played by Rosanna Hyland and Kristen Gaetz, are barely fleshed out.
Musical director Nick Barstow, Gibbons, Alice Offley and Rich Craig, who make up the band, get to act a bit too and are part of the action on Edward Iliffe’s busy, colourful set that’s perfectly in period, as are the costumes. But ‘Old Friend’ or not, I won’t be rushing to see it again.
Jeremy Chapman
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