Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’ musical, based on EL Doctorow’s novel, offers a kaleidoscopic but never complex portrait of the US in the years before the first world war. “Those days were lavender-tinted,” trills Mother (a deliciously full-throated Anita Louise Combe), but actually they come across as rose-tinted and bland. This is despite the fact that racism, poverty and trashed dreams are all elements in the overlapping stories of an affluent Wasp family, a black piano player (played by the compelling Ako Mitchell) who is denied justice, and a Latvian Jewish immigrant artist turned movie pioneer.
Real figures from history, including Henry Ford, anarchist Emma Goldman and the illusionist Harry Houdini, keep popping up but to no particular purpose except to prolong proceedings, and it’s almost the interval before McNally and co stop bombarding us with rousing ballads and get down to some actual storytelling.
Director Thom Southerland has a hard-won and deserved reputation for spinning tarnished Broadway musicals into gold, and he and his vast, fine-voiced cast, including some excellent actor-musicians, work hard to make a case for this one, which flopped on its UK premiere in 2003, when its first night coincided with the US invasion of Iraq.
But it is clear that it wasn’t just bad timing that did for it: this overly earnest celebration of the making of modern America often looks and sounds hopelessly naive and shamelessly manipulative. Southerland and his cast can’t rescue it from itself, but you have to admire them for giving the impression that they’ll die trying.
- At Charing Cross theatre, London, until 10 December. Box office: 0844 493 0650.
