METRO MAGAZINE REVIEW

Author: Gilbert Wong
Web exclusive

The Auckland Theatre Company ends the year with a bang with its Broadway musical Sweet Charity, writes Gilbert Wong.

It’s doubtful there is a theatre company in the land as smart at staging big stage spectaculars as the ATC. The traditional end of year musical is a chance for the company to unleash a slam bang theatrical experience and Sweet Charity largely lives up to the hype.

In Jackie Clarke (above) as the perpetually hopeful, hapless Charity they have the right performer, a physical comedienne who belts out gutsy Broadway numbers with a voice that barely needs milking. Clarke is a singer not an actor and director McColl has assembled a trio of experienced actors Sophia Hawthorne, Stephen Butterworth and Cameron Rhodes in support to add deftness and necessary texture.

Hawthorne has a sultry, strong singing voice. Rhodes as Herman, the creep manager of the Fandango ballroom is ridiculously odious, his comb over almost a character in its own right. The athletic Butterworth leads the ensemble of dancers whose rendition of the Rich Man’s Frug in the Pompeii nightclub is a mop head, beehive wigged out pop art miracle. The snappy, syncopated dance moves are driven by a great backing band led by music director John Gibson.

Shona McCullagh’s choreography defers to Broadway legend Bob Fosse and gives the necessary ironic Austin Powers wink to the audience. Looming behind and above the performers is John Parker’s majestic set. A series of layered photographic city backdrops that shuffle like a giant pack of cards, echoing the perpetual motion machine that is Manhattan and hinting at the slicing and dicing of fate its citizens endure in this most lively and potentially cruelest of metropolises.

Musicals are about the tunes, not dramatic coherence nor complex characters. Set in 1966 New York, Charity’s character is already a hangover, the woman as victim, kissing a lot of toads who will never be Prince Charming, prudish on the cusp of sixties style liberation. The electric, neon Rhythm of Life song and dance sequence with Charity as an unlikely Madonna hints at the social change to come in the second act. But thereafter the story subsides. Charity’s hard luck story ends at it begins. The finale is flat and at a running time of more than 150 minutes plus interval, it’s hard to avoid periods of flab. We want a big bang end but the showstopper tunes have been and gone, deflating the finale. You leave thinking that it would be good to see the Frug again. Yeah, baby.

Sweet Charity directed by Colin McColl, Auckland Theatre Company, Sky City Theatre, until December 16.