Strictly Ballroom ★★★★
When Baz Luhrman’s Strictly Ballroom showed up on movie screens in 1992, I instantly thought about the great musical it would make. Many of the film’s fans may have had the same thought. Now it looks as if we’ve all waited 26 years to discover just how right we were.
The musical—a jukebox musical—is extremely strong, particularly as directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie, who leaps to the top ranks of director-choreographers working on either side of the Atlantic.
When the rousing action begins, the story of Scott Hastings (Jonny Labey), who loses his dancing partner and agrees to try out unpromising hanger-on Fran (Zizi Strallen), looks as if it’s being sent up by McOnie and bookwriters Craig Pearce and Luhrman, who are both repeating their movie-scripting tasks. The initial impression is that the going, though colorful and brash, could be rough.
All comes right, though, when Fran, stumbling through her first sessions with skeptical Scott, tells him he must dance “from the heart.” By that advice plain-until-beautiful Fran sounds the show’s obvious motto: If dancing is a metaphor for living and loving, it’s best done from the heart.
There’s an additional theme underlying a series of dance contests run by autocrat Les Kendall (Richard Grieve), who demands that dancers hew strictly to ordained ballroom moves. In this version he represents fascistic behavior (very timely these right-drifting days)—with Kendall sporting a Donald Trump-like toupée, no less.
While narrator Wally Strand (Will Young) intones many of the selected ditties (“Love is in the Air,” “Dancing With Myself,” “Time After Time,” “Dancing in the Street,” Georges Bizet’s Carmen melodies prominent among them), everything about Strictly Ballroom clicks—including abundant creative elements and a chorus of dancers rarely off-stage. In a particularly outstanding sequence, Fran’s dad Rico (Fernando Mira) teaches Scott the paso doble to a high point on the Wowometer. Strictly Ballroom also features the most creative use of (brief) audience participation I’ve seen in years, but no giving it away here.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ★★★★
Muriel Spark’s 1961 put-her-on-the-literary-map novel was first adapted for the stage by Jay Presson Allen, but for the Donmar Warehouse—in which Lia Williams give a performance somehow akin to a red-crested bird singing robustly on a wire—David Harrower has managed a new adaptation.
Perhaps the shift is simply because the first version required a rather large cast, and artistic director Josie Rourke wanted a smaller number. But Harrower does appear to have more in mind. He begins his take with Sandy Stranger (Rona Morison), one of Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème girls about to become a nun—this is Spark, too, of course—and chafing during an interview by a journalist (Kit Young) concerning the school days she’s turned into a bestseller.
Harrower shifts other elements as well, though itemizing them doesn’t make much sense, especially for those not acquainted with either the novel or the play. Incidentally, it’s a play closely based on Spark’s 1930s school experiences—and very much on a teacher called Miss Christina Kay. In addition to the journalist, Harrower does reinstate the character of Joyce Emily Hammond, who, as Spark has it, joins the Spanish Civil War on Miss Brodie’s encouragement. (Allen dropped Joyce Emily and combined her with Spark’s dim Mary Macgregor.)
Had Spark been asked by Reader’s Digest to write about her most unforgettable character, she would likely have written about Christina Kay. So her play is a lively and at the same time disturbing character study—the dramatic portrait of a woman at a small Scottish school for girls (she pronounces the word more like “gels”) who in her need to believe she leads a glamorous, influential life creates one for herself and her impressionable charges—until that world collapses.
Polly Findlay directs Williams, the girls and men in her life with precision. For his part Harrower comes up with superb lines and retains the one where headmistress MacKay (Sylvestra Le Touzel) demands Miss Brodie visit her at 4:15 p.m., and Miss Brodie says that Miss Mackay thinks “to intimidate me by the use of quarter hours.”
Julie ★★
In the program, the credit for this version of the well-known 1888 play Miss Julie goes this way: “by Polly Stenham after Strindberg.” When you think about it—especially after you’ve seen the gnarly production directed by Carrie Cracknell with no holds barred by—it crosses your mind that there are a few meanings that can be attached to that mischievous “after.”
Such as “to get after with a vengeance.” That’s the appropriate one for this appropriation from Stenham, who’s best known for her over-the-top That Face, the vulgarity of which has much in common with this take on August Strindberg’s forerunner.
The original three-hander has to do with the rich young woman of the estate who spends more time in the kitchen than is usual for a lady of means. This sorry night she’s there to make a cross-the-classes play for self-possessed servant Jean while maidservant Kristina looks on with betrayed abandon.
Evidently thinking the play needs modernizing to draw young contemporary audiences, the National Theatre management has unleashed Stenham, who adds 20 figures to the action under the titles “party goers” and “supernumeraries.”
Stenham imagines Julie (Vanessa Kirby) is celebrating something—her birthday? It isn’t clear—and so a few times set designer Tom Scutt’s plain upstage kitchen wall lifts to expose the expanded population knocking themselves out orgiastically in Scutt’s madcap outfits and to Stuart Earl’s persistent music.
Julie is among them, and so for a brief minute or two is Jean (Eric Kofi Abrefa). Most of the time they’re back in the kitchen while this hysterical Julie seduces this Jean (or is it the other way around?) on every flat surface while this Kristina (Thalissa Teixeira) expresses one-dimensional dismay. By the blackout, Stenham has gotten after Strindberg all right. She’s reduced his battle between the sexes and between the social strata to coarse flailing.
Strictly Ballroom opened April 11, 2018, at the Piccadilly (London) and runs through October 20. Tickets and information: strictlyballroomthemusical.com
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie opened June 12, 2018, at the Donmar Warehouse (London) and runs through July 28. Tickets and information: donmarwarehouse.com
Julie opened June 7, 2018, at the National Theatre (London) and runs through September 8. Tickets and information: nationaltheatre.org.uk
