I saw the flaw in the idea just too late ... Desperately Seeking Susan - the musical. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
This is the pitch: the film Desperately Seeking Susan retold through the magic of the songs of Blondie. I saw the flaw in the idea just too late: I was already inside the Novello Theatre at the Aldwych, ready to attend a preview of this new musical. If the pleasure of theatre is the thrill of the live experience, there is a corollary: a painful performance is all the more horrible because it is happening right there, in front of you.
I had volunteered to keep a friend, a reviewer, company. I was a fan of the original film, which starred Madonna just as her career was taking off. I was an even bigger fan of the film's director, Susan Seidelman, who had directed the punk film, Smithereens, which starred Richard Hell, composer of the song Blank Generation and creator of the safety pinned T-shirt. I am, most definitely, a fan of Blondie. So this musical might have been thrown together with me in mind. But as I took my seat, I did reflect that the Abba musical, Mama Mia, was written around the songs. The songs were not forced on to an existing story. Also, even the greatest Blondie fans recognise they never had many great songs: there are no forgotten gems on the original LPs. All the brilliantly memorable pop classics were released as singles: there are 12 of them (thirteen with Maria). As the black-and-white parallel lines on the curtain rose, I began to wonder how songs as specific as Rapture or Union City Blue could be fitted to the Desperately Seeking Susan storyline. I was wary and I was nervous. And I still had not foreseen the biggest problem.
Pirouettes, leaps and West Side Story-style finger clicks do not sit well with the punk idiom. The closest punk came to showbiz was Sid Vicious's version of My Way. Debbie Harry could not dance at all: she was jerky and off-beat, which somehow made her even more beautiful. To interpret her music as straight musical theatre (by which I mean utterly camp, of course) does not work. Punk rock and jazz hands do not mix. Throughout the first half of the show, my embarrassment and discomfort grew. The actors and dancers gamely hoofed, smiles frozen in their heads. I smiled frozenly back. At least I knew, I only had to make it to the interval.
This is the one thing that will always save the theatre: you can walk out. The interval is an integral part of the experience, proof that, at a formal level, theatre has evolved to a pitch of perfection. It allows for an escape, a joyous release into the night. I took it and ran.
