Reasons for staging ‘lost gems’ usually involve them being ahead of their time or uncannily pertinent for today, but sometimes the sheer joie de vivre they exude is enough. No one would ever expect state of the nation commentary from Ivor Novello, but his final show Gay’s the Word, for which Alan Melville provided the lyrics and opened in 1951 starring Cicely Courtneidge and Lizbeth Webb (the most popular ingénue of her day who passed away last month), does tell us a great deal about the state of musical theatre once Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! arrived on our shores. With their integrated approach and three-dimensional characters, appetites for far-fetched, loosely structured plots featuring swooning maidens and heroic princes waned. Novello died suddenly a month after the premiere of this shamelessly self-referential show that opens with an ensemble of sacked Ruritanian footmen expelled from Drury Lane, where his work has never been reinstated and probably never will.
Stewart Nicholls’s production, which was first staged in the Finborough’s Sunday and Monday slot a year ago, transfers to the refurbished Jermyn Street auditorium (no more dangling feet) with tons of style, fizz and candy colours, neatly marshalling the cast of twenty around the tiny stage. Such fun makes one more indulgent towards the holes in the book (adapted by Richard Sterling – a programme note explaining the extent of the revisions would have been helpful), and the temptation to be too knowing (the title had no connotations in the 1950s) is for the most part resisted.
Gay Daventry is a turn in the truest sense of the term. Dedicating her life to the wicked stage and blessed with the dramatic range of a teaspoon, she knows how to give the audiences what they want until her vanity project Ruritania! backfires on its pre-West End tour. Never one to be defeated, a new project arises when her young co-star Linda inherits £2000 and asks Gay use the money to set up a stage school in her Folkestone manse. Being a headmistress isn’t plain sailing: she isn’t really one to give instruction in how to act naturalistically, the bank manager is on her tail and a pair of spivs have their eyes on her house. A little ‘Vitality’ is the answer to everything – the show’s earworm is a catalogue of all the music hall stars who beguiled the public by making a direct connection with their audiences, a style that was long becoming outmoded.
The slightly star-crossed lovers ramp up the cuteness factor: Helena Blackman sings like a lark in the classic Novello pure soprano numbers ‘Finder, Please Return’ and ‘On Such a Night as This’, sweetly partnered by Josh Little as clumsy dilettante actor Peter. There’s a lovely sense of living history with the presence of original ensemble member and Tony Award-winner (1961, Irma la Douce) Elizabeth Seal, who, with her fellow teachers Eileen Page, Gaye Brown and Myra Sands (who also doubles up as a plain-speaking Mancunian groupie), make up a hilariously sadistic quartet of failed performers reduced to extracting the smallest modicum of ability out of hopeless cases. No scene in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies is quite so full of undisguised bile.
Ultimately, this is Gay’s show and Sophie-Louise Dann sparkles. Her outstanding voice, heartiness that suggests once a principal boy, always a principal boy, and twinkle in her eye makes it very easy to understand how Gay became a theatrical institution inspiring such affection amongst her followers. The show does rather perpetuate the myth that all musical theatre performers can’t act, but never mind.
