Theatre
Won't you charleston with me?
Published 07 August 2006
Naughty girls and frisky fellows make for perfect summer entertainment
The Boy Friend
Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, London NW1
The summer musical at Regent's Park this year is Sandy Wilson's 1953 classic, The Boy Friend, which cascades out over the evening air like a stream of freshly blown bubbles. From the minute the band strikes up with Wilson's ritzy overture, and the English ladies of Madame Dubonnet's finishing school in Nice trip on to the stage - each one shingled of hair and buttoned of shoe - you know you are in for a treat. This is not a show for heavy analysis but, like a proper summer's evening should be, an event of pure pleasure.
The story, in Wilson's pastiche of a 1920s musical comedy, is slight; the gals in Madame Dubonnet's establishment may have pots of money and heaps of style but each lacks that crucial accessory: a Boyfriend. And how they want one. As they put it: "We slave for him,/We even misbehave for him!" And although Madame and her delightful assistant Hortense (whose outrageous French accent is one of the many gigglish touches of the night) do all they can to keep Les Filles from meeting Les Boys, it's not long before a quartet of straw-hatted swains leaps on to the stage and everyone is doing the charleston.
In order to get away with a frothy, silly show like The Boy Friend, however, you have to take the business of being light terribly seriously: your charleston has to be sharp, your soft-shoe shuffle absolutely right, your tapping just so. Fortunately, Ian Talbot's company has not only the charm but the stagecraft to make its striped bathing suits and its drop-waist dresses move in exactly the right way. In particular, Summer Strallen as Maisie, whom I would say has the longest legs currently in action on a London stage, and Michael Rouse as her American heart-throb, Bobby Van Husen, move across the set together in Bill Deamer's inventive choreography as if drawn by a magnetic force. The event is as much a showcase for period dancing as anything else.
Meanwhile, the hit songs - "The Boyfriend", "Won't You Charleston With Me?", "I Could Be Happy With You" - flow into one another with apparently no effort as the cast appears in a range of increasingly silly, frilly costumes and ends up doing the cancan in the middle of a toy model of Nice, built, in a design masterstroke, as a series of sandcastles.
The plot thickens, but not too much, as our heroine Polly Browne (the bottle-blonde ingénue Rachel Jerram) nears her heartfelt aim of finding a Boyfriend of her own. Her father (the delightful Steven Pacey) turns up and realises that Madame Dubonnet (Anna Nicholas) is indeed his own former amour Kiki. The Boyfriend (Joshua Dallas) and Polly fall helplessly in love, as of course they must, and even though both come from the ranks of the idle rich, they sing dreamily about being poor in "A Room in Bloomsbury". It gives them such a "glow inside" to "know our plans coincide", and thanks to Wilson's peerless lyrics, which never cease to sparkle with blithe spirit, their mutual attraction doesn't have a bad effect on the audience either.
Needless to say, The Boy Friend is thoroughly politically incorrect: class differences are scorned and national clichés upheld, and Talbot himself has a hilarious cameo as Lord Brockhurst, a risqué old man who is forever trying to lose his dragon of a wife so he can get off with, as he puts it, the "sporty young fillies". But there is absolutely no point turning up for The Boy Friend with a sharpened social agenda. What you must do is come to this witty show with a desire to be enchanted - and perhaps a boyfriend, or equivalent, of your own.
For further booking details, visit www.openairtheatre.org
Pick of the week
Nicholas Nickleby, Parts I and II
Festival Theatre, Chichester
This tale of heroism triumphing over educational abuse is the highlight of the Chichester Festival.
Under the Black Flag
Shakespeare's Globe, London SE1
Swashbuckling story of Long John Silver that has critics complaining it glorifies piracy. As if.
Sunday in the Park with George
Wyndham's Theatre, London WC2
Stephen Sondheim's music and the set coalesce in one of the greatest theatrical coups imaginable.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
