Be warned: no, it isn’t, not in any sense of the word and its shifting meanings down the decades. Gay’s The Word (1950) is a lethal piece of musical theatre, the final offering from Ivor Novello, a bizarre concoction that spins between bitter and twee and winds up resembling a sort of deranged gangshow.
On this evidence, it’s easy to understand why the West End boasts a Novello Theatre but has seen no full-scale run of any of his musicals in more than 40 years.
Gay Daventry (Sophie-Louise Dann) is a fading stage star condemned to appear in Ivor Novello-style operettas when the fashion is for the “new American musicals” (we swiftly start to empathise with this part of her plight). Given that Gay displays the grim cheerfulness of a sort very prevalent in mid-20th-century matrons in drama, she decides to open an acting academy.
The plot pinballs wildly, lacking the courage of almost every conviction, and the audience is reduced to wondering with gritted-teeth horror if the song Bees Are Buzzin’ will require the cast to dress as bees and buzz about. It does.
The basic trouble is that director Stewart Nicholls seems uncertain as to whether he wants everyone to play this nonsense straight, itself a path fraught with perils, or to send it up. The production flails in a swampy No Man’s Land between these two unmade decisions, with the cast largely holding Novello’s particular style of RP at arm’s length with tongs. Occasional flashes of optimism— the hit number Vitality, for instance — flicker and die.
Not every show must go on.
Until March 2 (020 7287 2875, jermynstreettheatre.co.uk)
