The Kissing Dance – Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre

Kira Morsley in The Kissing Dance at Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre, London.
Picture: David Ovenden

The Kissing Dance continues at Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre, London until 28 February.

Rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Oliver Goldsmith’s 18th century comedy She Stoops to Conquer sits on a clear line from Shakespeare’s funnier comedies to modern day farce. Its tale of improbable misunderstandings, disguises and deception skewers some of the English hypocrisies around the class system that persist to this day.

Howard Goodall and Charles Hart’s musical adaptation The Kissing Dance receives a temporal update in this Walthamstow revival, moving the Restoration comedy to the early 20th century, echoing Wilde and Feydeau in its tale of society marriages and understairs dalliances.

Goodall’s music echoes various ends of the English folk tradition, from the genteel dances of the aristocratic courts to the buer-fulled, baser shanties sung by the lower classes in raucous evenings down the local hostelry. Straddling these two worlds is Jacob Jackson’s Tony Lumpkin, whose mother has married into Yorkshire’s wealthy Hardcastle family, but who himself finds comfort in the arms of the local innkeeper, Bet (Emily Chesterton).

Jackson is cheeky boyish charm personified, and his mischievous pranks that set the play’s true events on their way (as in the feisty ensemble piece ‘Nonesuch’) showcase the best that The Kissing Dance has to offer. Hart’s rapid-fire lyrics, set to Goodall’s fine music, are accompanied by some fine choreography by Charlotte Tooth.

But while dance can get away with, even demands, exaggerated movement from the performers, when such movement carries over into the spoken book, the effect is less pleasing. The comedy within Goldsmith’s original, lightly adapted in this musical, does not need to be as overplayed as it is under director Brendan Matthew’s instruction here, with caricature replacing personality in all too many roles.

Chief culprits are the Hardcastles, with Laurel Dougall and Andrew Truluck veering towards the slapstick on far too many occasions. Thankfully, Kira Morsley as the show’s romantic heroine, Kate, offers up a far more natural performance, allowing her comedic moments to shine as much as her romantic ones, providing the brightest spot in the whole show. As the supporting romantic duo Constance and Hastings, Emily Peach and Robert Metson flirt with both dramatic styles as much as they do with each other, but are much the better when they do not succumb to the overblown style so prevalent elsewhere.

For a musical which adapts such a classic theatrical work, it is a shame that its story is so front-loaded. An event-filled Act I is followed by an Act II which has about five minutes of plot, the rest filled by songs and reprises of songs that serve more to delay the conclusion of the story than to build towards it.

The musical’s title number makes its appearance here, in a sequence which, though once again highlighting the good choreographic work this show displays throughout, offers no connection to the main narrative. And when the conclusion to the story does finally arrive, Goodall’s insistence on reprising large chunks of the musical’s previous numbers feels like a combination of The Lord of the Rings’ drawn-out ending and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’s megamix – combing the worst elements of both.

Musical director Aaron Clingham and his five-piece band bring out the best in Goodall’s tunes, but the balance between orchestra and singers is often off so much that Hart’s witty lyrics go unheard. In a better interpretation of a better musical, such technical limitations in a Fringe theatre can be easily cast aside, but here they do add to the dissatisfaction with a piece that is otherwise not without some better moments.

Scott Matthewman

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