John Travolta’s Tony Manero is one of cinema’s great lords of the dance, sinuous and sexy as hell. While his machismo and pride are matched by his grace and suppleness on the floor, he can be a real jerk off it, misogynistic and casually cruel. He’s both a suave ladies man and a kind of awkward novice, possibly virginal under all the fidgety braggadocio. It’s a performance for the ages, and extremely hard to imitate. Without Travolta, Saturday Night Fever is almost unthinkable.
Any stage adaptation has to grapple with this absence, even if you can find a performer with the charisma and physical skill to fill the role. This production of the jukebox musical – which debuted in 1998 on the West End featuring Australia’s Adam Garcia, and draws heavily from the film’s phenomenal soundtrack album by the Bee Gees – stars relative newcomer Ethan Churchill.
While he looks the part, tall and hairy-chested, Churchill has an underpowered voice and a lack of warmth and vulnerability. He’s an ersatz Tony Manero in some ways, a posturing schoolboy whose talent on the floor is unremarkable and certainly not as impressive as he claims. This is a legitimate reading of the role, but it fatally undercuts one of the story’s key appeals: sensational dancing.
The plot is thin at best. Tony is a 19-year-old Italian-American paint salesman who lives at home with his parents Flo (Chelsea Plumley) and Frank (George Kapiniaris), in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He spends his time hanging with mates who adore him, cruising for chicks who find him irresistible and, every Saturday night, tearing up the dancefloor at his favourite Manhattan nightclub, 2001 Odyssey. At the disco, Tony is king – even if he feels like a schmuck every other day of the week.
One night he spots a girl dancing – her name is Stephanie Mangano (Regan Barber), flinty and self-assured – and recognises in her not only a kindred spirit but someone who might help him escape Bay Ridge and the life of drudgery and diminishing choices laid before him. She agrees to partner with him on the dancefloor in hopes of winning a competition, as long as “there’s no funny business” along the way. Tony immediately throws over his current dance partner, Annette (Izzi Green), and he and Stephanie get to work.
In the film, each scene of Tony’s day to day existence acts like a tributary feeding into the grand river of the nightclub scenes; it’s no accident that bridges form a key symbol, as access points to the Shangri-La of the dancefloor and a Manhattan of endless possibility. But this distinction is largely lost on stage: the club becomes simply another location for Tony’s carelessness and solipsism to play out. He’s also rarely seen dancing (certainly never alone, as he does so memorably in the film), so the line from his brother Frank Jr (Matthew Casamento) extolling his talent makes no sense. Frank’s never seen him dance!
Director Drew Anthony leans heavily on projected backdrops (Aquixel Studios) to evoke the texture and atmosphere of late-70s New York, its grit and dirty glamour, and the cast do well enough with the Brooklyn accents that a sense of verisimilitude is sustained throughout. The screen technology allows for seamless transitions and clarity of storytelling but it’s a lazy way to build a milieu. There’s something inherently anti-theatrical about people standing on a shallow stage in front of a giant screen speaking dialogue lifted verbatim from a film.
As with so many of Anthony’s productions, the lighting is excessive and cheesy and the sound patchy and inconsistent. The cast battle through admirably, and a couple of performers stand out. Sam Hamilton wrings much pathos from the troubled Bobby C, even if he over sings and over emotes his solo number, a slowed-down version of Tragedy. Barber brings steeliness to Stephanie and Green is excellent as the rejected Annette, while Kapiniaris and Plumley add gravitas to the family scenes.
Saturday Night Fever is best enjoyed as a family-friendly nostalgia trip – Tony’s C-words become B-words, and an utterly vile scene of gang-rape mercifully occurs offstage – rather than a fully realised dramatic repositioning of a cultural icon. Pop songs rarely work in the way musicals require; they tend to establish a single mood and repeat, instead of building character and advancing plot. This cheap knock off makes so little of its one key advantage, the kinetic energy that comes from real dancers on stage, that it leaves you merely pining for the original. That’s its real tragedy.
Saturday Night Fever is on at the Athenaeum Theatre until 25 January
