The Musical of Musicals (The Musical) – Above the Stag

The Musical of Musicals (the Musical) continues at Above the Stag, London until 22 December 2018.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Musical theatre composers have their certain foibles and tropes, those thematic elements which crop up from show to show. No more effectively is that illustrated than in Joanne Bogart and Eric Rockwell’s The Musical of Musicals (The Musical), a comedy revue which takes one simple plot and views it through the prism of five sets of composers.

Each of the five retellings concentrates on poor ingenue June (Charlotte Christensen), who is struggling to pay the rent to evil landlord Jitter (James Thackeray). She receives advice from Cecily Redman’s matronly Abby, and moral support from her true love, Willy (Sev Keoshgerian, impressing in his professional debut).

First on the satirical chopping block are Rodgers and Hammerstein, combining traits of Oklahoma!, Carousel and The Sound of Music into the Kansas-set Corn! Every element is here: the young romantic leads’ idealism, the use of marriage as a financial transaction as opposed to love – and most importantly, the wise words of the local matriarch.

‘Follow Your Dream’ is a startlingly accurate pastiche of ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in a show which is full of them. Bogart and Rockwell’s music and lyrics capture the mood of the composers, while their book crams in pun after pun to keep the laughter going.

The sense of a coherent whole to a composer’s work which makes Rodgers and Hammerstein so easy to parody is less inherent in Stephen Sondheim’s work. A Little Complex finds the similarities by crashing together several of his bigger works – principally Into the Woods, Company and Sweeney Todd – to present a story of Jeune, who rents an apartment from Thackeray’s Jitter, a mad artist who plots to murder his tenants. Thackeray is on great, psychotic form here, although Redman’s matriarch (here, an alcoholic lady who lunches) once again steals proceedings.

That matriarchal role reaches its zenith in a pastiche of Jerry Herman musicals, as Redman’s Dear Abby gently mocks the likes of Mame and Hello, Dolly! Truly, this is the weakest of the five pastiches, but the narrator’s description of an audience rising to applaud Abby’s latest costume change as being “led by gay men” is doubly true in this production directed by Robert McWhir, staged as it in the studio space of a dedicated LGBTQ theatre.

That narrator’s voice is, in fact, one of the show’s weakest points. It is just full of pointed jokes as the rest of the dialogue, but in playing it in as a recording, it frequently finds itself lost underneath the laughter of the audience. Which, one supposes, is one of theatre’s better problems to have.

Certainly, it frees up musical director Simon David, who as the show’s fifth on stage presence might have been called upon to narrate as well, to concentrate solely on delivering a constant barrage of note-perfect imitations of musical styles, which he does with immeasurable skill.

Act II brings the final two pastiches. Aspects of Junita looks at the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the only British composer featured – and one whose work faces the most barbed critique mixed among the affectionate parody. Similarities of some Phantom of the Opera melodies to the work of Puccini come in for some stick, as does Lloyd Webber’s repetition of musical themes within the same show.

In contrast, the final piece is far more reverent. Speakeasy looks at Kander and Ebb’s work, from Chicago to Cabaret and Liza with a Z – but is just as much a parodic tribute to Bob Fosse as it is to his musical collaborators. The exquisite combination of attractive people singing about how tragic their life is has rarely been bettered than it is here, especially in a raucously performed pastiche of ‘Cell Block Tango’.

Ultimately, there is an affection for the source material that shines through in Bogart and Rockwell’s creation, and McWhir’s revival in Above the Stag’s intimate studio is a highly welcome one. This is a show which acknowledges the corniness of many musicals and chooses to love them because of their hokey qualities. And when looking for a one-line summary of the whole show, one need look no further than its first, farm-set number: “Oh, what beautiful corn!”

Scott Matthewman