★★☆☆☆ The Third Man: The Classic Film Musicalized but De-Classicalized
by David Finkle
In the mad rush to turn every successful – or even minimally successful play and movie – into a musical, some titles eyed from the ever-lengthening list don’t register as especially good targets. But perhaps if the right craftsmen take on the assignment, there are no bad ideas.
After tries by several teams, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe transformed Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, nothing to turn a cynical nose up at. Only last month, Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas took Days of Wine and Roses, surely a recalcitrant choice, and came up with a gravely convincing musical chamber piece.
And now, at London’s habitually intrepid Menier Chocolate Factory, comes The Third Man with a creative trio whom Las Vegas mavens might have given heavily favorable odds. The adaptation from the classic 1949 Graham Greene-Carol Reed movie of the same name boasts Christopher Hampton (Sunset Boulevard) on book and lyrics, Don Black (Sunset Boulevard) in the same capacity, and George Fenton (100 film score credits) as composer.
Anyone inclined to bet on a happy outcome would have thought it a sure thing that this auspicious trio would prevail. Make that four. Director Trevor Nunn (once tireless Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre nabob with Cats on his meters-long list) does the helming work. Yes, any gamblers thinking they were playing with a gold-plated winner would have been – wait for it – wrong.
Way, way wrong. For the most part, the venerable contingent follows the film’s plot. Woefully naïve American novelist Holly Martins (Sam Underwood), who concocts westerns for a modest living, arrives in divided and dour 1947 Vienna to look up old friend Harry Lime (Simon Bailey), only to discover his onetime crony has just been killed in a car accident.
Sensing that something doesn’t jibe in the conflicting reports he receives, he sets out to uncover the truth and, in his search, comes in hopefully romantic contact with Anna Schmidt (Natalie Dunne). She’s Harry’s devastated girlfriend working in Vienna with false papers he fixed for her.
The Hampton-Black-Fenton-Nunn crew nudges along a plot in which Major Callaway (Edward Baker-Duly), who heads the English sector overseers, knows Harry is running a black market in diluted penicillin. When, and eventually to Anna’s dismay, he coerces Holly in a scheme to entrap his not-so-dead pal, the result knocks the naiveté out of Holly once and for all.
Though Emma Chapman keeps her lighting tenebrous on Paul Farnsworth’s skimpy set, neither she nor the other off-their-form purveyors are able to capture the bereft Vienna atmosphere that Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker lent the film.
Good-looking leading man Underwood gets the naïve part down, but not much snap happens between him and Dunne, who in this version isn’t an actress specializing in farce but, for musicalization purposes, a so-so night club singer. In an otherwise competent cast, the stand-out is Bailey as a thrillingly stern Lime.
Unfortunately, none of the hard-working performers get to introduce a score that rises above the mildly pleasant or sometimes sophomorically ironic. Strains of Anton Karas’ zither theme occasionally piped in can’t cover the lapse.
Movie fans will recall that Greene’s ending, revised by Reed, is one of the greatest final fadeouts in film history. Hampton and Black don’t repeat it but present an alternate with its own sting. They’re also wise to retain the famous line ending the Ferris Wheel scene wherein Harry, rationalizing his criminal activities, points out that the Medicis ran a corrupt Italian state, yet art thrived – whereas the Swiss had eras of peace but contributed what?: “the cuckoo clock.” Let’s leave it that this take on The Third Man is less Medici, more cuckoo.
The Third Man opened June 19, 2023 at the Menier Chocolate Factory (London) and runs through September 9. Tickets and information: menierchocolatefactory.com
by Bob Verini
Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical has more or less exploded onto the London scene to a torrent of critical raves and a much-talked-about cadre of repeat visitors to the venerable Fortune Theatre. (I’m not sure whether they’ve been given an informal posse name like “Rentheads” yet, but just wait. “Mincemeeters”?) The riotous crowd enthusiasm at the matinee I attended reminded me of my early encounter with Six, another fringe effort by talented young up-and-comers.
Whatever the creators known as “SpitLip”— David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts – may lack in Six’s turbocharged Girl Power, they more than make up for in invention and comic energy. There are strong echoes of the social satire of Monty Python in its prime, as well as the shape-shifting theatricality of Patrick Barlow’s The 39 Steps. The show is a takeoff on a famous 1943 WWII deception, immortalized on film as The Man Who Never Was (1956) and currently in Netflix’s Operation Mincemeat, which transmitted disinformation designed to induce Hitler to move his troops out of Sicily, site of a planned Allied invasion.
The means to that end – contriving a random corpse to impersonate downed Naval Intelligence officer “Capt. William Martin” and wash up onto the Spanish coast – was and is so preposterous as to invite lampoon, beginning with a takedown of Oxbridge snobs’ inflated self-importance in the opening number “Born to Lead.” Also on the Lips’ list is management’s excruciating sexism in its treatment of female employees; hugger-mugger within Whitehall involving a possible German “mole”; and the often wacky ways of overseas diplomats, plagued by confusion and dipsomania right out of a Graham Greene novel.
The score by the quartet is appropriately pastiche-y, running the gamut from rap to Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, and the casting has an utter disregard for gender. The script in fact demands that swaggering strategist Ewen Montagu (Hodgson at the performance I attended; nine players are available to rotate through the five roles) and starchy office manager Hester Leggett (Jak Malone) must be gender-switched. The cheeky, rascally air keeps one on the edge of one’s seat, not just in terms of the wartime consequences but in awaiting what surprise the show will next pull out of its hat.
Maybe the biggest one is SpitLip’s audacious leap from spoofery to seriousness, as the identity of the anonymously deceased indigent who “never was” is brought to light and respectfully honored. As is the sacrifice of those on the Home Front, when Hester improvises – in Malone’s pure tenor – a fake love letter to be found on William Martin’s person, and we gradually become privy to the very real heartbreak she must be channeling.
Not to worry, though. Under Robert Hastie’s assured direction, the production’s jester’s cap and bells are always close at hand. Act Two begins with “Das Ubermensch,” a K-Pop-inspired boy band of five jackbooted Nazis celebrating the Reich in front of Mark Henderson’s sizzling red-and-black-themed light show. The crowd (us) explodes in cheers for the fantastic choreography (Jenny Arnold is credited) and musicianship (Joe Bunker directs the music while Steve Sidwell orchestrated it).
Suddenly the cold light of HQ snaps on, revealing spymaster general Johnny Bevan (Roberts) staring at us in unmitigated contempt. “Really?!” he snarls. “Whose side are you on?!”