Music and mayhem

Tony Blair — the Musical / Gilded Balloon; Tony! The Blair Musical / Chambers St; Yellow Hands / St George’s West; Jihad: the Musical / Chambers St; The Bacchae / King’s Theatre

Here’s the formula for satire at the Fringe. Take a scary concept, stick ‘the musical’ after it and you’ve got a catchy title and an audience. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, Osama — all been done before. This year it’s Blair. Twice over, in fact. Like we haven’t had enough of him? Tony Blair — the Musical is so toothless it belongs in an old people’s home. The cast are genial but the presentation is slapdash. Tony’s floppy fringe droops down to his nose, Gordon’s Scots accent is missing, Mandy wears a beard and Prezza is played by a lanky redhead. A few good things: Clare Short is brilliantly done as a truculent hysteric who rasps out an over-Brummy dialect through clenched teeth, and Blunkett gets laughs by bumping into chairs and making speeches to people who are standing behind him. Sadie the Labrador appears as a glove puppet who scans Blunkett’s notes and whispers them into his ear. That’s clever and funny but the rest is so warm-hearted and accepting of New Labour that it might have been written by David Cameron. Big crowds, though.

Anyway, don’t confuse this with Tony! The Blair Musical, which is far wittier and more cutting. James Duckworth is an astutely stumbling Blair, his charisma undercut by a shifty and relentless niceness. The script has claws. The ghost of Diana shows up to boost Tony’s morale. ‘Have you come far?’ he asks, ‘only the traffic’s murder out there. Ooh, er, whoops.’ And when Blair cements his relationship with Bush he comments, ‘From the start, we clicked.