Singin’ in the Rain

To put the 1952 MGM classic Singin’ in the Rain – arguably the most perfect screen musical of all time – on stage at all is to begin at a disadvantage. How do you improve on perfection? And how do you wrestle with the memories of Gene Kelly wrestling with the rain?

Moreover, it’s a film about film-making, and a key period of juxtaposition between the end of the silent movie era and the advent of the talkies in the late 1920s. It’s a story of and about the cinema, not the stage. With all those strikes against it, it’s amazing that theatre producers – from the late Harold Fielding (at the London Palladium in 1983) to the West Yorkshire Playhouse (whose production transferred to the National in 2000) over here, plus a short-lived 1985 Broadway outing directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp – have kept trying to make this square peg of a show meet the round hole of a stage.

For this third, and in my view, most successful, attempt to bring it to the London stage in the last 21 years – in a version co-produced by Sadler’s Wells with Leicester Haymarket to which it transfers in September to re-open the beleaguered theatre – they have found the insouciant X-Factor to justify the renewed effort, and its name is Adam Cooper.

The ex-Royal Ballet principal dancer and Adventures in Motion Pictures star is making a completely natural and effortless transition to musical theatre, as both star (with his pleasant light tenor, boyish good looks and, above all, tremendous stage charisma) and his own choreographer. Not since Broadway’s Tommy Tune has there been someone to rival him in this double duty.

Last summer Cooper starred at the Royal Festival Hall in a production of On Your Toes that had originated at Leicester and that he also choreographed. It was a real musical, originally conceived for the stage, complete with two extended ballet sequences to test his talents with. But if Singin’ has inherent failings as a stage vehicle, Sadler’s Wells is at least a real theatre, and far more hospitable to watch a musical in.

A supporting cast that includes Ronni Ancona as Lina Lamont, the actress with a voice that could strip paint, and Josefina Gabrielle as his love interest, ably supports him; though I found Simon Coulthard as his bumptious sidekick Cosmo Brown made me grimace rather than laugh in his big “Make ‘Em Laugh” solo.

While Paul Kerryson’s production, checking in at nearly three hours long including an interval, isn’t as swift as the film that’s a fast and smart 100 minutes, it’s no wash-out, either, except when it intends to be for that all-important Act One title sequence with which Cooper makes a dazzling assault on our senses (and memories of his fabled screen predecessor in the role). For press night, the rain arrived on cue off stage as well as on, making sure that we entered the theatre singing in the rain as well as leaving it singing the title song.

– Mark Shenton