All the Fun of the Fair

As an excuse for a musical based on one of
his albums, David Essex
hasn’t aimed all that high: a string of old hits, a fairground on the
skids, a Jack-the-lad son two-timing the fortune-teller’s daughter with
the daughter of a shady entrepreneur, East End “watcher cocks” and
lots of coloured lights and cuddly toys.

But in its own honest, rather stilted way,
the show has a beguiling melodramatic charm, and Essex as Levi Lee, the boss in
a pork pie hat and tightly packed jeans, has several poignant moments of mock
vanity when he admits that the older he gets, the better he was.

The Essex voice sounds these days as if
coming strained through a tea towel, but with its emphatically Cockney vowels,
parched timbre and casual inflections, it was always a fairly distinctive pop
instrument, and it served him well on stage in Godspell and
Evita, less so in his own project,
Mutiny.

The songs are less wittily strung together
than they are in Mamma Mia!, and the fairground setting
isn’t as organic a design feature as it is on Coney Island in
Love Never Dies, but the stomping simplicity of “Hold
Me Close,” for instance, is well mobilized by the cast suddenly emerging
on a few dodgem cars, and the rabble-rousing “Gonna Make You a
Star” serves the double purpose of reintroducing the Wall of Death into
the fairground and transforming the twitchy retard on the rifle range.

The Wall of Death was dropped after
Levi’s wife had a fatal accident – possibly brought on by his
affair with the fortune-teller. And Slow Jonny remains a loser until
transformed again at the end when he joins Levi and Jack on their motorbikes
for the raucous finale, “Silver Dream Machine.”

Essex’s songs – plus the
melodic lamentation “Winter’s Tale” by Tim Rice and Mike
Batt – litter the storyline by Jon Conway, the offstage band (with the
odd incursion of two acoustic guitarists) is supervised by Olly Ashmore and
the whole show is efficiently staged by Grease director
David Gilmore and colourfully designed by Ian Westbrook.

Essex’s younger self is winningly
played by newcomer Michael Pickering, Slow Jonny by Tim Newman, the two
girlfriends by Susan Hallam-Wright and Nicola Brazil, and the Irish gypsy
woman given romantic flesh and blood by Louise English. Rock on, but strictly
for fans.