The great tap-dance musical 42nd Street returns to the West End later this month, and director Maria Friedman offers a curtain-raiser with a revival of Richard Harris’s lame but likable period comedy about a group of women and one man taking tap classes in a church hall in the early 1980s. Designer Robert Jones has fun with the fashion horror show of leg-warmers, jumpsuits and Farrah Fawcett flicks.
There’s very little substance either in characterisations – the mousy one with a secret; the brassy one; the snob – or the episodic plot, and it’s all far creakier than my knees. The play is full of female characters and yet completely devoid of feminism: these late 20th-century women seem untouched by the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, let alone those of Germaine Greer. But the show builds neatly to its can-do, feelgood, tap-dancing finale in which the participants overcome loneliness, resentment, class difference and a preponderance of left feet to strut their stuff together.
There are some nice performances, too. As the affluent, germ-anxious Vera, always putting her foot in her mouth, Amanda Holden is sharply comic but needs more warmth. Tracy-Ann Oberman is really good value as Maxine, a woman who would sell her own grandmother. Anna-Jane Casey (standing in for Tamzin Outhwaite, who withdrew with a broken ankle) gets teacher Mavis’s mix of tough fragility spot-on. And when they do finally dance, you want to dance too.
- At the Vaudeville, London, until 17 June. Box office: 0330-333 4814.
