Review: Thoroughly Modern Millie (UK tour)

Thoroughly modern? Distinctly old-fashioned, more like. This is a revival of Broadway’s 2002 musical version of the 1967 Julie Andrews-starring movie set in New York in 1922… but it feels out of step in 2017.

It’s a piece of utter froth, with a predictable romantic plot that goes off like clockwork. Kansas girl Millie – played by Strictly Come Dancing‘s Joanne Clifton – moves to New York, bobs her hair and gets a job as a stenographer, in order to persuade the rich boss into marrying her. Cue a lot of cringe-worthily kittenish behaviour around the typing pool, before Millie realises the man she ought to be with has been right under her nose all the time… In case you miss the hardly subtle message, Millie’s wise jazz singer friend Muzzy even literally tells her: "follow your heart."

But if the rom-com side is a bit datedly daffy, a sub-plot about white slavery is… oh, let’s use the thoroughly modern word: problematic. The women-only hotel full of wannabe actresses that Millie lodges in is run by pantomime villain Mrs Meers (Eastenders and Corrie actress Michelle Collins), who pretends to be Chinese. Working with two actual Chinese brothers, she kidnaps any orphans who check into the hotel and packs them off to be sex slaves in Hong Kong ("I won’t stand by while critics praise ya/You’re getting shipped to Southeast Asia," as one song has it).

Her 'comically' lisping accented impression, with chopsticks in her hair, is eye-wideningly horrid – but, supposedly, the writers Richard Henry Morris and Dick Scanlan are exploding stereotypes, contrasting her deliberately offensive yellowface with two real Chinese characters. Such nuance, in this production at least, is not very visible.

As was brought up in last week’s row over Howard Barker’s play, when an ethnic group is woefully underrepresented on our stages, it’s worth looking at whether the stories that do occasionally get told also unhelpfully reinforce stereotypes. And oh boy, do they ever in Thoroughly Modern Millie.
For starters, the Chinese brothers, Ching Ho (Maltese actor Damian Buhagiar) and Bun Foo (Andy Yau), genuinely are engaged in white slavery. Yet this was a moral panic, a myth that’s been debunked by historians. Admittedly, it’s heavily sent up in this production – lots of exaggerated horror – but it is still, er, actually happening in the plot.

They are also, frankly, directed as comic figures in Racky Plews‘ interpretation, and their ethnicity is uncomfortably part of that. Working in a laundry, they are figured as weak mummy's boys, duped into obediently doing nasty Mrs Meers’ dirty work with the false promise that she’ll bring their mother over from Hong Kong. When Ching Ho unexpectedly – spoiler alert – becomes a love interest for a glamorous young flapper, the fact that he is short and meek and bad at speaking English is played for laughs; every time he kisses the beautiful, tall blonde woman it’s a joke. Meanwhile, the audience is invited to give a chorus of 'awws' for her spurned previous suitor, the all-American, rich white businessman. Just think about that for a minute: successful Chinese lover = hilarious, spurned American lover = sympathetic. There is a long tradition of emasculating racist stereotyping of Asian men, and this is not upending it. It is recreating and reinforcing it.

Beyond this, the show often fizzes: it’s got a hot poppin’ jazzy score, and snappy, flappy choreography. There are wittily staged moments; I loved the tap-dancing, desk-twizzling typists, and "The Speed Test", a rapid-fire, letter-dictating patter song. While on the acting front it’s all rather over-egged – Clifton is cartoonish as Millie, and the supporting cast of fellow flappers are utterly slappable in their shrill, shrieking pastiche of '20s femininity – they kill it when it comes to a Charleston.

Katherine Glover playing posh-girl-slumming-it Dorothy (initially Mary Tyler Moore in the film) and Graham MacDuff as Millie’s boss, Mr Graydon, have the richest voices but also know how to send up the clichés of big musical numbers; their love-song is extremely silly.

The set, a silvery-grey Art Deco construction, both abstractly evokes a hotel lobby and the New York skyline, while the 1920s costumes, boasting more sequins than Debenhams in December, will help add to the glittery appeal of this good-time show about a good-time girl. But it may sparkle, this production is certainly not dazzling enough to distract from the dodgy plot and characterisation.

Thoroughly Modern Millie tours the UK untill 24 June.