Summer froth

Midsummer. Holidays loom. Migrations are being pondered and planned. Right now the English theatre-going middle classes are yearning for August, for Tuscany, for the pine-scented South, and for the sunbeds where they’ll sprawl and doze all summer smeared in perfumed lard and turning the colour of teak. Lovely. The West End is ready for these adjustments and from now until September it’ll provide what the British film industry has to supply all year round — cultural room-service for Americans. You start to wonder why Americans go abroad at all. Perhaps to discover how unadventurous they are, how closely they cleave to the known, the familiar, the homely.

This year’s lucrative game of catch-yank begins at the Novello with a Broadway import, The Drowsy Chaperone. This is a musical about musicals but don’t run for cover yet, it’s actually pretty good. The curtain rises on an effeminate loner sitting at home playing show-tunes on an ancient stereo. His favourite musical is a forgotten Twenties flop which uses every cliché known to drama. When he puts the disc on the turntable the show magically springs to life in his apartment. The plot, deliberately crass, involves a society wedding where the groom is a rich, brainless pin-up, the bride is a show-girl reluctant to retire, the chaperone is a drunken nympho and the villain is a Spanish cad who prowls the stage smoothing his moustache and looking for someone to seduce. After numerous identity confusions everything ends happily. Well, more or less.

The show’s great attraction is that it mercilessly satirises musicals whilst remaining utterly enchanted by their traditions. This blend of glossy exuberance and sly sophistication is an absolute winner. Bob Martin is charmingly vulnerable, and very funny, as the housebound saddo with more records than friends.