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Top-notch tosh

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

Zorro
Garrick

The Tailor and Ansty
Old Red Lion

Is Zorro any good? Forget the show for a second, look at the marketing. The stars are English, the story is American and the music, by the Gypsy Kings, is French with a strong Spanish flavour. That’s half the Western hemisphere covered. Nice work, everyone.

Things start uneasily with a crowd of Romany dancers on stage performing a heel-bashing number that doesn’t do much more than rattle your fillings. Next the show hurtles from California to Barcelona and back, establishing the complex background of the central figure, Diego, a renegade cavalry officer who must wrest the Spanish colony of Los Angeles from the grip of an evil usurper, who was once his childhood pal.

It’s all top-notch romantic tosh with everyone prancing about in slashed shirts, tasseled jackets and velvet pantaloons held up with belts made of curtain-rope. But the show’s rhythm is choppy and its mood is very changeable. It’s a melodrama, it’s a romance, it’s a thriller, it’s a comedy and sometimes, when the widows in white singlets get going, it lurches uncomfortably towards Greek tragedy. These variations are a problem. Diego dons his Zorro costume for the first time and a gypsy pouts at him sceptically, ‘What are you planning? To entertain them to death?’ Good line, but it hurts the show’s integrity. A great musical invites you to escape into an illusion and if it breaks the spell and reminds you that it’s just a pretence, it implodes.

But just before the interval there’s a five-star moment, an absolute belter of a song and dance routine in which Lesli Margherita’s scorchingly beautiful Inez leads the cast in a thunderous version of ‘Bambaleo’. Here Zorro is being sincere, not mocking itself, not straying into alien territory, not indulging in snatches of ironic cleverness, but going for gold, pumping the house full of heart-hugging melodies and launching itself at the music, and at the audience, in a state of rhapsodic oblivion. That’s where the money is.

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