The smart and welcoming St James Theatre near Victoria Station has just been acquired by Andrew Lloyd Webber and will become an incubator venue for new musicals in the new year. Before that happens there's plenty of musical revivals to come, modern classics Rent and The Last Five Years are scheduled for new productions following a production of mine in the main house and it's neat little cabaret bar is currently home to an intimate staging of The Stripper, an infamous flop from the 1980s with lyrics by Richard O'Brien who wrote The Rocky Horror Show.There's much to enjoy. The venue itself is a great setting for a film-noir murder mystery set around the dodgy nightlife of LA in 1962. A jazz band plays in the corner and the audience sit at bar tables grouped around the small stage. As you enter the cast mingle with the audience which on press night included many people in vintage costume so it really did feel like stepping into the glamorous, dangerous world of LA Confidential or the musical City of Angels.
Don't expect anything as sophisticated as either of those titles, though. This is a plod through the cliches of pulp crime fiction in the company of writers who seem to have neither the wit or panache to parody the genre or critique it.
As is the case with actual film noir and pulp fiction the sexism is really troubling. Women are either stupid, victims or temptresses attempting to trip up the protagonists who are almost always men. This show even takes this further and literally reduces its women to commodities.
A stereotypical hard nosed detective in classic, trilby tilted, Humphrey Bogart style (Sebastien Torkia) is investigating the suicide of a lonely woman. Did she fall or was she pushed? As he investigates her background women everywhere throw them selves at him wanting sex (mostly played by Hannah Grover) including the sister of the deceased who is the stripper of the title. (Both sisters played by Gloria Onitiri)
The show shudders to a halt every ten minutes thanks to a succession of plot stopping songs and lyrics dripping with sexual innuendo. It's funny for a while but as the evening grinds repetitively on in the airless subterranean bar it becomes increasingly hard to care who the murderer was.
I feel very sorry for director Benji Sperring who must have thought he was on to a winner when he unearthed a forgotten show by the Rocky Horror team, presumably whilst reviving their other near-miss Shock Treatment. I can't imagine any director or cast throwing themselves into resurrecting a script with so much commitment and energy; especially the actors who rapidly swap back and forth from character to character with great panache. Alas they're fighting a losing battle.
Fans of HBO's Boardwalk Empire will enjoy the chance to see Marc Pickering who played the young Nucky Thompson so well in the final series, making the best of a string of character roles.
The production is the living embodiment of that old show biz adage "you can't polish a turkey but you can roll it in glitter".
They have and it still doesn't fly.
Located in the heart of Dalston, the Arcola Theatre is a venue that is more than comfortable in its hipster surroundings. Across two spaces, it boasts a varied programme of emerging and established artists. As actors go, they don’t come more established than Greg Hicks. A longstanding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Olivier Nominated for his portrayal of Coriolanus, Hick’s is currently starring in The Kreutzer Sonata in Studio 1 of the Arcola.