Sweet Charity

The last time I witnessed a performance of Sweet Charity, it was from the bottom of an orchestra pit. Any attempt to follow what was going on was hampered by my obligation to provide the music, and so it was with excitement that I approached Saturday's performance. After five years, I'd get to see what all the laughter was about.

In a nutshell, Sweet Charity is the tale of a young girl called Charity Hope Valentine (Alice Boagey), a sweet, naive taxi dancer who has a habit of falling for the wrong kinds of men. Then one day she finds herself stuck in an elevator with Oscar Lindquist (Jethro Compton), a neurotic but kind tax accountant who could provide the ticket to the life of bourgeois respectability she has always desired. All this is played out to a classic broadway soundtrack with a Bert Bacharach style sixties twist.

Now, such was the quality of the show that I'm finding this review quite difficult to write. The last thing I want to do is bore the readership with a long list of superlative-laden platitudes but I'm afraid in the name of journalistic integrity, I must. First of all, credit to director Michael Slater for his broad yet detailed sense of perspective. A lot of amateur musical theatre productions are so focused on the leads and their development of narrative that the wider picture is ignored. Chorus members are just there to make up the numbers and interaction with the scene's setting is minimal. Scenes which are set in a park, for example, are so underdeveloped that they could have easily been set somewhere else, say in a restaurant, or on the moon. Under Slater's production, the chorus was not a rabble of faceless dancers but a group of three dimensional characters constantly aware of their surroundings, enriching the scene, not just milling about like extras in a shit soap.

The leading pair of Alice Boagey and Jethro Compton had real chemistry, the happy-go-lucky Charity providing the perfect foil for Oscar's Woody Allenesque displays of neuroses. The character of Charity doesn't seem like an easy one to play. One has to be lovable, ditsy and outgoing without being an irritating Shirley MacLaine style pain in the arse. Thankfully, Boagey struck this balance with consumate ease making us laugh while also managing to convey a deep sense of pathos at the terrible treatment she experiences at the hands of the men she meets.

Comic turn of the night was Tom Rogers' portrayal of international movie star Vittori0 Vidal, an absurd, hirsute caricature with a voice that could have belonged to Borat's Italian cousin. His stormy relationship with his high maintenance lover Ursula provided a few moments of explosive, scintilating melodrama. Credit also to Nickie (Victoria Jones) who sang astoundingly well. Anyone with ears can be trained to sing but the powerful, gravelly timbre of that voice seemed to be the product of innate musical ability that one has to admire and envy at the same time.

The band lead by conductor Gavin Whitworth was a tight, professional outfit that got better and better as the night went on and all technical aspects of the show were flawless. So there it is: an overwhelmingly positive and just plain dull review. I'm coming back for the next show and you should too.

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