Lucky Stiff, a musical farce by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (Once on This Island, Ragtime), has been around since 1988 when it won the Richard Rodgers Award for an Off-Broadway production by the Playwrights Horizons theatre company. Since then, it has had moderate success over here in the UK but is a well-loved staple of amateur musical theatre groups.
The show is based on the novel The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo by Michael Butterworth, and concerns a down-at-luck British shoe salesman, Harry Witherspoon, who learns he has inherited $6million from an uncle he never even knew existed.
However, to claim the inheritance, he has to take his dead uncle’s corpse, propped up in a wheelchair, to Monte Carlo for a trip of a ‘lifetime’. On his trail are: his uncle’s ex-lover, short-sighted Rita La Porta, who feels she is entitled to the money, and her optometrist brother; Annabel Glick, sent from the Brooklyn dog rescue centre to make sure Witherspoon fulfills his terms of the will (otherwise the dogs get the money); and a mysterious Italian playboy called Luigi. As you can imagine, it involves a lot of running around and missing bodies, door-slamming and gun-toting, along with the inevitable ‘well-there’s-a-surprise’ blossoming romance.
Dominic Marsh stars as Harry Witherspoon along with Nikki M James as Annabel Glick. Marsh is a classically trained actor with a more than passable voice, while James has a stunning voice but looks a little bit wooden. Pamela Shaw and Jason Alexander overact their way through the film, but it actually suits the material, and Shaw in particular makes the most of her character as the ageing blonde bombshell. The late Dennis Farina camps it up with the rest of the cast, as the greasy Luigi, spreading his joie de vivre in a mysterious manner.
I have never seen this show on stage but I believe it has a bit of a cult following. I have to say that the film, directed by Christopher Ashley, tends towards being a bit stagey. Whether this helps its cause or not I can’t make up my mind. It is beautifully shot in a retro-style, evoking the flavour of its continental setting in the late 1960s. It is at heart a light, campy comedy. Nothing too heavy. The film is spattered with animation elements which, when used as briefs cut-throughs, are quite effective, but then they are used in larger doses and lose their impact.
This film, available in digital formats including iTunes, will appeal to the thousands of people who have seen the musical since it was first produced in 1988, through to those who have taken part in myriad amateur productions. I only wish that other small musicals like this were being filmed for posterity. One day we will wish they had been.
Nick Wakeham
* Lucky Stiff is available on iTunes and other digital platforms from 27 May, courtesy of Signature Entertainment.
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