The Grand Tour (Finborough Theatre)

It’s 1940. The Nazis are 24 hours from Paris and France is about to fall. Millions of men and women will wake up under occupation. An extraordinary resistance movement will be born. And against all that, Jerry Herman‘s dainty little musical gives us – what? – a road trip and a spot of petite jalousie.

In fairness, Herman’s story was dictated by his source material: Franz Werfel’s semi-autobiographical play Jacobowsky and the Colonel, later filmed as Me and the Colonel. In it, two Polish immigrants – wily S.L. Jacobowsky (Alastair Brookshaw) and steadfast Colonel Stjerbinsky (Nic Kyle) – flee Paris, picking up the latter’s fiancé Marianne (Zoë Doano) en route and swooning all the way to St Nazaire on the East coast. Musically, though, Herman’s syrupy, sentimental numbers tip the scales, and the trite quickly becomes twee.

The two men have very different attitudes to war. (They are opposing Poles). Jacobowsky, an intellectual Jew quite accustomed to taking flight, is a survivor: always optimistic and endlessly adaptable. He makes the best of situations, selling what he need sell and hiding when he need hide. The Colonel, aristocratic and somewhat anti-Semitic, would always rather turn and fight. Both men fall for Marianne and she, in different ways, falls for both of them.

There’s more in those differences than Thom Southerland‘s production allows. Is Jacobowsky’s self-preservation rational or cowardly? Is Stjerbinksy’s steadfastness noble or dunderheaded? Neither Brookshaw nor Kyle find the tensions at play: one’s unfailingly breezy, the other, simply gruff. They’re a double act and not much more.

Their journey becomes a caper too, increasingly ridiculous – not least because they seem to be running from the only SS officer in all of France (Blair Robertson), who pops up demanding papers at every turn. One fix follows another, until the pair wind up blagging their way through a high-wire circus act. What larks! The war itself often feels like a backdrop for romance.

The question – and, again, Southerland makes little of it – is whether it’s better to do "one extraordinary thing" in the face of force or to carry on as usual despite extraordinary circumstances. There’s bravery in both of course, and the show’s peaks with a Jewish wedding conducted under the Nazi’s noses, with Jacobowsky presiding.

Herman does defiance well. He wrote La Cage Aux Folles and its anthemic "I Am What I Am". There are traces of that in The Grand Tour: Marianne’s resolute in "I Belong Here" while Jacobowsky’s mettle comes through in "I’ll Be Here Tomorrow", particularly second time around, husked by Brookshaw. Reduced down to two keyboards, however, songs often gloop together: a mish-mash of café couture pianos and quivering Vera Lynn vocals.

Belonging and being here tomorrow aren't the same though, and Herman makes a sudden swerve towards Zionism at the end that, after so much slush, jolts uncomfortably. More problematic is that Southerland seems less interested in the show's ideas than its charm, and its sepia-tones and sentiment eventually swallows the lot.