Emma Berge reviews the latest West End fail, Kneehigh's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Gielgud Theatre.
It looked so good on paper. A sung-through French romance based on an Oscar-nominate film, music by multi-award winning Michel Legrand, English lyrics (ha! lyrics) by multi-award winning Sheldon Harnick, and starring Joanna Riding. How did it go so wrong?
Cheeky cabaret artist Meow Meow sets the scene for us with a brief lesson in French language and culture. As Maîtresse, she is charming, relaxed and very funny. At the end of her ten minute introduction, she warns us that the people of Cherbourg sing. A lot.
What she doesn't warn you is that they don't sing about a lot, and that she may as well have set the scene for an entirely different show. After a second intro in which a toy car is driven through the miniature streets of Cherbourg for no apparent reason, the sung-through musical begins in earnest. Horror slowly dawns as you realise that although it's sung through, there are very few lyrics – it's mostly sung dialogue. Which also means that there are very few discernible tunes. It must have been hell for the singers to learn.
The cast are generally very good, but the show is carried by Joanna Riding as Madame Emery and Meow Meow as Maîtresse (Maîtresse, not mattress. And yes, that joke does get old). Riding somehow manages to find some humanity in her rather two-dimensional character, and her voice is as strong and expressive as always. But if Madame Emery is a bit 2D, the romantic leads are very 2D. Whilst Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand as Geneviève and Guy have lovely voices, they struggle to evoke any kind of pity or empathy for their wet and boring characters.
The thin plot of the show is: boy meets girl, boy gets girl up the duff and goes to war, girl meets rich man who loves her and promises to take care of her, boy is a little perturbed, boy finds someone else. And that's pretty much it.
In the programme, ‘Part II: L'absence’ is subtitled 'pourquoi'. This is an accurate subtitle for Part II, and indeed the whole musical. Why is Guy's Aunt Elise played by a man in a grey wig? Why the sequence with the toy car? Why do they sing dialogue? Setting dialogue to music only adds one thing: time. It takes five seconds to ask for a cup of tea and say that the kettle's already boiling. It takes much longer to sing it.
If you're an arty-farty type, you may enjoy Umbrellas of Cherboug for its elegant set changes, endless – sung – protestations of “if you go I'll die”, overt Frenchness and lovely ensemble work from Kneehigh theatre company, who seamlessly move set, props and even people (why walk when you can be carried?). Kneehigh and director Emma Rice managed to create wonders with the adaptation of British love story 'Brief Encounter', but their innovations in Umbrella of Cherbourg fall flat with no decent plot or lyrics to hold them up. If you like rhymes and tunes in your songs and plot in your stories, give this one a miss.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg runs at Gieldgud Theatre until 1st October
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