mlukfc.com Forums - View Single Post - Whistle Down The Wind to return to the Westend

**Diane** · 31 Mar 2006, 19:25

... and a not so good review from the Financial Times http://news.ft.com/cms/s/88c52318-be...779e2340.html:

Whistle Down the Wind, Palace Theatre, London
By Ian Shuttleworth
Published: March 28 2006 18:04 | Last updated: March 28 2006 18:04

With the closure of The Woman in White after only 17 months, the producer Bill Kenwright has drafted in this earlier work to fill the theatre until Eric Idle’s Spamalot begins previewing. As a serendipitous result, one Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in which a train hurtles out of a tunnel at a climactic moment has been replaced by another (and neither is Starlight Express).

On its West End premiere in 1998, Alastair Macaulay described the musical adaptation of Mary Hayley Bell’s novel and Bryan Forbes’s 1961 film as “entirely harmless and almost entirely uninteresting”. That is not an unfair verdict. On this, my first exposure to the show, I was intrigued to hear Lloyd Webber rising to the challenge implicitly posed by his lyricist Jim Steinman, creator of Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell and other rock arias.

Transposing Bell’s story from England to 1959 Louisiana allows the writers to hitch a ride on the first flush of rock’n’roll and the archetypal teen rebellion associated with it. The Lloyd Webber/Steinman partnership comes good on numbers such as “A Kiss is a Terrible Thing to Waste”, all burning rubber and hormones, sounding somewhere between Springsteen and Wagner, albeit with added monosodium glutamate. But most of the time the score sets the emotional pace, and never breaks sweat. And the story – of a teenage girl in the Bible Belt (Claire Marlowe, too old to play such innocence convincingly) finding a murderer hiding in her barn (Tim Rogers, all musical theatre tragic hero) and mistaking him for Jesus Christ – really needs some emotional intensity in the telling, not mere button-pushing.

Kenwright’s direction does not help, and Henry Metcalfe’s choreography is similarly journeyman. Kenwright famously cannot bear to see a theatre left “dark”, which I presume explains this betwixt-and- between piece of scheduling: I can see no other rationale behind the decision to take a show deliberately premiered in the medium- sized Aldwych Theatre and revive it in a venue awash with gilt plasterwork and wholly at odds with Paul Farnsworth’s timber-and- big-sky design. Still, the show is entirely harmless. ★★★☆☆

31 Mar 2006, 19:25	#12
Diane Super Moderator Join Date: 04.02.2003 Location: Guernsey, Channel Islands Posts: 3,462	... and a not so good review from the Financial Times http://news.ft.com/cms/s/88c52318-be...779e2340.html: Whistle Down the Wind, Palace Theatre, London By Ian Shuttleworth Published: March 28 2006 18:04 \| Last updated: March 28 2006 18:04 With the closure of The Woman in White after only 17 months, the producer Bill Kenwright has drafted in this earlier work to fill the theatre until Eric Idle’s Spamalot begins previewing. As a serendipitous result, one Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in which a train hurtles out of a tunnel at a climactic moment has been replaced by another (and neither is Starlight Express). On its West End premiere in 1998, Alastair Macaulay described the musical adaptation of Mary Hayley Bell’s novel and Bryan Forbes’s 1961 film as “entirely harmless and almost entirely uninteresting”. That is not an unfair verdict. On this, my first exposure to the show, I was intrigued to hear Lloyd Webber rising to the challenge implicitly posed by his lyricist Jim Steinman, creator of Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell and other rock arias. Transposing Bell’s story from England to 1959 Louisiana allows the writers to hitch a ride on the first flush of rock’n’roll and the archetypal teen rebellion associated with it. The Lloyd Webber/Steinman partnership comes good on numbers such as “A Kiss is a Terrible Thing to Waste”, all burning rubber and hormones, sounding somewhere between Springsteen and Wagner, albeit with added monosodium glutamate. But most of the time the score sets the emotional pace, and never breaks sweat. And the story – of a teenage girl in the Bible Belt (Claire Marlowe, too old to play such innocence convincingly) finding a murderer hiding in her barn (Tim Rogers, all musical theatre tragic hero) and mistaking him for Jesus Christ – really needs some emotional intensity in the telling, not mere button-pushing. Kenwright’s direction does not help, and Henry Metcalfe’s choreography is similarly journeyman. Kenwright famously cannot bear to see a theatre left “dark”, which I presume explains this betwixt-and- between piece of scheduling: I can see no other rationale behind the decision to take a show deliberately premiered in the medium- sized Aldwych Theatre and revive it in a venue awash with gilt plasterwork and wholly at odds with Paul Farnsworth’s timber-and- big-sky design. Still, the show is entirely harmless. ★★★☆☆