photo:Tristram Kenton
It would be crazy to expect too much coherence from this compilation musical. The story derives from Philip Barry's play, Philadelphia Story (1939). That was the source for Hollywood's glamorous High Society (1956), with Cole Porter songs. Then in 1987 came the stage version of the movie, which extensively raided the Porter catalogue. Now revived at the Crucible, that play is a bizarre patchwork quilt.
Even allowing for its rather tortured growth, the show has other problems. I find it hard to warm to its heroine, Tracy Lord, a breezily self-confident American socialite intolerant of other people's frailties, especially her ex-husband's alcoholic excesses and her father's philandering. Only when she gets wildly smashed on the eve of her second marriage (to a puritanical nerd) does she learn to accept her own fallibilities. The libretto's attitude to the American upper-crust is one of prurient snobbery, however. It implies that old money is inherently preferable to new (Tracy's intended second husband has inherited a mining business), and that there is something vaguely disreputable about people who actually have to work for a living, such as the Spy Magazine journalist and photographer who invade Tracy's nuptials.
They, of course, get to sing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which is one of the few numbers that genuinely arises from the action. Some of the other Porter songs, however delightful, are stuck in rather arbitrarily. It makes little sense, for instance, for Tracy's brattish kid sister to launch into Friendship (originally a duet for Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr in DuBarry Was a Lady). You feel the precocious Dinah is auditioning for the show rather than extending the narrative. Even the poignantly romantic In the Still of the Night comes a little oddly at the end of a second act filled with allegations of drunken debauchery.
If, in spite of all this, Fiona Laird's production gives considerable pleasure, it is because it is so stylishly done. The designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis, has shrewdly placed a false proscenium on the Crucible stage and created a back wall in which a doric arch melts imperceptibly into the waters of Newport, Rhode Island. Tim Mitchell's lighting bathes the stage in a beautiful aquamarine glow and even creates the effect of a moon-reflecting swimming pool.
Jenna Russell is arguably too earthy and sexy a performer to be the ideal Tracy Lord, but she excellently captures the transition from affected mockery to emotional humility. Ian Duncan, making his English stage debut, also endows her first husband, Dexter Haven, with just the right indolent charm. High Society will always be a mish-mash of a musical, but at least in Sheffield the individual ingredients are served up with great delicacy.
· Until January 26. Box office: 0114 -249 6000.
