Once Upon a Time at the Adelphi

Phil Willmott’s sentimental musical paean to the vanished glory of a Liverpool hotel, Once Upon a Time at the Adelphi, was first seen in the summer of 2008 during the city’s European Capital of Culture festival.

It’s gamely revived at the Union, Willmott directing again, with a new cast disporting themselves in the tiny room as bell-boys, tweenies, war-time GIs and office secretaries while young Alice, doubled by Rebecca Hutchinson with a present-day hotel employee, encounters the ghost on the roof of her older self (Ally Holmes).

Alice became an assistant manageress while her boyfriend Thompson (Jon-Paul Hevey), a thief who graduated from the kitchen to accounts, goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War and fails to return after the subsequent wider conflagration. The story is tortuously told, with some duff dialogue, and is over-egged towards the end.

But it’s an agreeable enough pastiche of a musical show that ends up like Happy as a Sandbag with MGM fantasy sequences. In the best of these, the company explodes into a Hollywood mish-mash of Fred Astaire, Easter Parade and Matthew Bourne’s Oliver! dances (good work with kitchen mops and saucepan lids), while the show’s main anthem, “Once in a Lifetime,” hymns the city and its people.

Willmott writes a serviceable lyric and knows how to construct a number even if his music never really soars, or sounds very original. He wittily incorporates a couple of apocryphal Adelphi legends – that Hitler once worked in the kitchen and Roy Rogers booked a room for his horse.

And there’s a nice cynical “Dance for me, Boy,” item for a Hollywood lush (smokily discharged by Lucyelle Cliffe) whose stolen engagement ring adds a bitter twist to the already stuttering central romance. No praise is too high for Willmott’s adept staging, and Andrew Wright’s choreography is downright breathtaking (and dangerous if you’re in the front row).

Hutchinson is generally affecting, but a little mawkish in her emotional crisis, and Hevey leads the cast with aplomb. Other eye-catchers are Matthew Markwick’s sweet contemporary boyfriend, Paddy Crawley’s outsized hotel manager and the vampish, vocally impressive man-eater of Jamie Birkett, who made the last sixteen in the search for a Nancy on television; one wonders, really, why she didn’t go further in the contest.

- by Michael Coveney