The Great American Trailer Park Musical at the Waterloo East Theatre, London
The Great American Trailer Park Musical continues at the Waterloo East Theatre, London until 5 June.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
The audience is going wild. The voices are huge, the band is pounding, Waterloo East theatre is throbbing with heat and noise, but we can’t for the life of us tell what’s going on. It’s press night for The Great American Trailer Park Musical, and it’s a lot of fun – but it just feels like it could be so much more.
We’re in a North Florida trailer park. The heat has drawn out our Greek chorus of muses, crisco-tanned and bottle blonde, led by Rosemary Ashe as a dry, foul-mouthed divorcee.
They welcome us in with tales of their escapades, and introduce our heroine, Jeanie, a forty-something agoraphobic played with healthy maturity, albeit by a twenty-something Jemma Alexander. Jeanie’s illness was triggered 20 years ago when her baby was comically stolen from outside a hair salon during an incident with a bad perm (please let’s give Amy George some sort of award for the comedy wigs here). When the enigmatic stripper Pippi (Sabrina Aloueche) appears on the scene and begins an affair with Jeanie’s hapless husband Norbert (Adam Vaughan), all hell breaks loose.
Designer Anna Kelsey’s world is full of a dilapidated pride that works well, and services the space cleverly for such an intimate venue, comprising of two trailers, a front yard open space and various fences to mark out the territories.
Aloueche is in stunning voice as Pippi, and though the more dramatic moments are occasionally a little self-conscious, she carries her part with a stoic reticence, providing a great contrast to Alexander’s panicked and heartbroken Jeanie, who steals the show in her Act II power ballad, ‘Panic’.
The pastiche is initially warm, but becomes more and more condescending and self-deprecating when Betsy Kelso’s book doesn’t allow the stereotypes to break down. Eventually, it feels as if we are watching something that’s just teetering on the edge of offensive, but perhaps more problematically, it just doesn’t make for good storytelling.
Sure, it’s fun, but there’s no one to empathise with. The characters are all just as bad as each other, the anecdotes are offhand and unresolved, and the absurdity of the plot isn’t comically valuable enough to be a good farce.
Though the whole cast is full of haphazard fun, the two standout cast members are Jodie Steele and Michelle Bishop, both giving it everything as Pickles and Linoleum (so named after their mother’s cravings and various conceptions). Their comic timing stands out vastly, and they bring the whole show up a notch.
Diction is an issue throughout. Between Gareth Tucker’s rock-concert sound design (not the best idea for a venue this small), the machine gun delivery of the accent and the three-part harmony patter chorus numbers, we can count ourselves lucky if we get the gist of the phrases, let alone the specifics.
The wealth of talent and experience in the room is huge. We have divas from the original cast of Phantom, from We Will Rock You, from Wicked, from Les Misérables, all together in one space, and it should spell perfection. However, what we end up with is two hours of high-energy vocal indulgence – mistake me not, these are stellar performers, but there’s just not enough for them to go on for it to be anything more than the sum of its parts.
David Nehls’ score is effective, but never quite memorable enough – the final ballad has an endearing hook (“I’m gonna make like a nail…and press on…”), but throughout it feels like we’re being fed the same song over and over. Kudos to members of a great band, however, who driove the piece masterfully throughout.
This show is great for a night out if what you want is a bit of fun and some high-class vocals – but Nehls and Kelso’s creation feels like it’s two rungs down from where it could have been.
Aura Simon
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