This is a good time for a show about Toulouse-Lautrec. The Victoria and Albert Museum has just opened its exhibition of art nouveau, that curvilinear movement in which the French artist figured prominently. This musical could have helped us reflect on how Toulouse-Lautrec learned to use bold simplification in his lithographs and paintings. That way Lautrec could have become a pendant to Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. But Charles Aznavour's new musical instead teems with skirt-waving bawdiness, allusions to split-crotch panties and vertically challenged sex.
There are 22 vapid songs, including two can-cans, a bump-and-grind tune involving squatting prostitutes and something called Doing It. There's even a drinking song: "Who gives a shit what people think?" shout the ensemble as they wave glasses of absinthe. Brave words.
This slickly directed show began brightly enough with a sarcastic ensemble number about incest. Little Henri was the product of an ill-advised encounter between first cousins. To find his identity, he plunged into the vice dens of Montmartre, fell in love with a prostitute, Suzanne. Later in the show, Suzanne wonders in song "Should Quasimodo's Esmerelda stay or go?" Each lyric is very nearly laughable and overburdened by psychological freight or crass allusion.
The principals are blameless. Sévan Stephan sings well; in lieu of a script that unfolds Henri's psychological development plausibly, that is the best he can do. Hannah Waddingham as Suzanne won the warmest applause for her belting solo in which she pleads with Henri's mother to let the by then syphilitic, alcoholic artist out of an asylum. She, too, deserves to be in a better musical. Only Robert Jones's imaginative set and costume designs truly distinguish themselves.
To spare everyone further suffering, Lautrec should be recast with Ronnie Corbett and Denise van Outen as the leads, the thing played as farce. It's halfway there already.
Until July. Box office: 0171-379 5399
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
