Starting Here, Starting Now – Waterloo East Theatre

Picture: Gareth McCleod

Starting Here, Starting Now continues at the Waterloo East Theatre until 18 July 2021.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire are together best known as collaborators on revue show Closer Than Ever, but their history dates to their days as Yale students together.

After leaving university, they collaborated on a number of musicals, many unproduced. From those attempts grew Starting Here, Starting Now, a collection of numbers on the subject of love, in particular its starting throes and, just occasionally, its endings.

And as London’s fringe scene struggles to start up again after 18 months of closure, Waterloo East Theatre’s choice of this revue is a signal to audiences to fall in love with theatre again.

On paper, everything clicks: a top notch cast – Nikki Bentley, Gina Murray and Noel Sullivan – backed by Inga Davis-Rutter, one of the industry’s best musical directors. And on stage, there are moments where the stars align correctly as well.

Murray’s rendition of ‘Crossword Puzzle’, a light and amusing number about a woman whose obsession with The New York Times puzzle pages was both a destructor, and reminder, of her previous relationship, is a particular delight, as is Sullivan in a similarly breezy comedic vein with ‘I Don’t Remember Christmas’. Both numbers are perpetual mainstays on the cabaret circuit with good reason, and it’s always a delight to see them performed with such élan as they are here.

Bentley has a similarly comedic moment with ‘I’m Going to Make You Beautiful’, in which a department store cosmetics girl combines make-up with a breakdown, but her real solo moment of note comes with the ballad ‘Autumn’, for my money the show’s standout number and one delivered with beautiful emotional clarity.

Overall, though, Starting Here, Starting Now is held back by being a collection of emotionally disparate songs from a songwriting duo at the start of their careers. One’s never too sure whether songs feel familiar because they are generic, they are pastiches of Sondheim or Kander and Ebb, or they’re unconscious facsimiles thereof from young writers yet to find their own voice.

It doesn’t help that the choreography of the three artists feels a little dated, even when the trio aren’t donning glittery gold waistcoats and embarking on a Chorus Line pastiche. Director Gerald Armin has clearly worked hard to allow his actors to perform socially distantly, even when the original revue would expect them to dance with each other – but the overall effect feels a little bit 1980s ITV. And while that’s in keeping with the age of the piece, it makes it hard to emotionally connect with the musical numbers in the way they deserve.

But maybe we don’t need that. Maltby and Shire’s songs may be about long-term relationships, but in terms of getting back into fringe musical theatre maybe a quick fling, a one night stand under a railway arch in Waterloo, is nothing to feel ashamed about.

Scott Matthewman