A Face in the Crowd musical at the Young Vic – review

Kwame Kwei-Armah launched his adventurous and enjoyable seven-year tenure as artistic director of London’s Young Vic with a genial musical version of Twelfth Night. He ends it with another new musical, the satirical A Face in the Crowd.

With music and lyrics by Elvis Costello and a book by Sarah Ruhl, this adaptation of the Budd Schulberg story which became a 1957 film directed by Elia Kazan, is a tale of a chancer who seduces a nation through the new medium of television and offers a weird hybrid of sensations.

It’s never less than enjoyable and features two outstanding performances by Anoushka Lucas and Ramin Karimloo, but its tone veers wildly from romantic, to political, to savage disillusion. It’s a show that quite often leaves you at sea, but happy as the waves wash over you.

It opens with Marcia Jeffries (Lucas), an ambitious young radio producer in Arkansas obsessed with putting real people behind the microphone. In search of “the face in the crowd”, she reports from a prison where she meets a drunken hustler whom she christens Lonesome Rhodes (Karimloo) and puts him on air.

Audiences are quickly won over by his homespun charm, his sense of identification with the common man and woman. But as he rises to prominence and becomes a television star first in Chicago and then in New York, his appeal curdles, and his messages of hope become tinged with anti-immigration rhetoric. A liar and a fantasist who can “overwhelm himself with his own sincerity”, he becomes a megalomaniac demagogue with political ambitions, who despises the crowds who follow him.

Even without rather too on-the-nose comments about crowd size and remarks such as “he says whatever comes into his head, we put it on T-shirts and they sell”, the parallels with a certain former US President are clear. But the show is also a parable about the gullibility of audiences and an attack on a medium that sees original talent and immediately uses it to sell energy pills.

All of this is told with some verve on Anna Fleische’s wonderful picture-book set which frames the action in wood-panelling and a rectangle of lights (designed by Jackie Shemesh) where the changes in costumes subtly mark the passing of the years. You can sense Costello having fun as he does the same, with music that begins with the sweet synchronicity of close-sung jingles and runs the gamut of the American songbook from Country and Western to torch songs and jazz.

It’s a glorious score (arranged and directed by Phil Bateman), with genuinely witty, clever lyrics that beautifully carry the story. Ruhl’s book and Kwei-Armah’s direction are less sure; the scenes are sometimes jerky and there are clunky lines like “I love you like Mary Shelley loved her monster” shoved in to explain the relationship between the strong-minded Marcia and her creature Lonesome.

That relationship, where Marcia, whose role is much strengthened from the film, remains loyal to the increasingly loathsome Lonesome despite the much greater appeal of Mel (a lovely, warm Olly Dobson, singing “Nice Guys Come Last”) waiting for her with open arms, is one of the problems of the second half. It doesn’t convince, but Lucas and Karimloo do everything they can to make you forget that.

She has a wonderful, effortless presence, her voice filling Costello’s soaring ballads as she attempts to define herself as a modern woman, while Karimloo’s astonishing vocal power allows him to negotiate the tricky balance of his character by rising to every song, whether it is the rustic appeal of his early bad-boy charisma or the more chilling sentiments of a chorus such as “Blood and Hot Sauce” as he eggs a flag-waving audience into hysteria.

The pair even handle the unreality of his final descent, with its moral about the power of the mass media. It’s an oddly unsatisfying ending to a show that promises more than it delivers, but consistently entertains while trying.