Bristol Old Vic
director Paul Unwin
designer Dermot Hayes
lighting Ben Ormerod
choreographer Gillian Gregory
Eight years had passed since I’d been musical director of Sweet Charity, a full-length musical comedy, albeit scaled down for repertory theatre resources. By comparison, Pal Joey was less exhausting, mainly because the job of arranger was handed to the estimable Anthony Bowles, my old boss from Jesus Christ Superstar. Anthony did fine work, as expected, but didn’t really enjoy himself. I don’t think the director made a good impression on him during their initial discussions. Then, once the arrangements had been done, he discovered he had not been credited on the poster, which was probably an administrative oversight, but he construed it as a something more than just a slight.
The big draw for BOV audiences was Jill Gascoigne, playing Vera Simpson, a rich middle-aged lady whom the eponymous anti-hero attempts to use as a rung on the stepladder to fame and fortune. Jill was inspired casting. She was genuinely charismatic onstage. Offstage, she was delightful, without a trace of the diva about her. Whatever reservations she may have had about the production, she was supportive, cooperative, and an excellent company leader. For example, Anthony’s arrangement of Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered didn’t really suit her — he’d opted for a slow, husky blues, whereas Jill’s Vera was wasn’t sultry. She was more New York penthouse, in the spirit of the role’s creator Vivienne Segal. All the same, Jill ran with the arrangement without a fuss, and made it work for her.
The journey to cast Joey was an interesting one. The role had been created in 1940, in a career-making performance, by Gene Kelly. Subsequent stage Joeys had also been primarily hoofers — e.g. Harold Lang, Van Johnson — until, in the 1957 movie, a vehicle for Frank Sinatra, Joey became primarily a singer (even though Sinatra had danced brilliantly in several movies, such as Anchors Aweigh and On the Town). The show seemed to have to lain dormant in the UK up to 1980, when the Half Moon Theatre in East London mounted a successful production starring Sian Phillips as Vera and Denis Lawson as Joey. Now, Lawson was not a hoofer. He was a good actor, who could sing and dance ok. The production was making a point: it’s not at all clear from the source material — a novel by John O’Hara — how good Joey is at anything, since he’s an unreliable narrator. The Half Moon production played with this to good effect — Lawson’s Joey was, in a way, trying to pul the wool over the audience’s eyes as well as Vera’s. And I think it was the Lawson model that director Paul Unwin, choreographer Gillian Gregory and myself had in mind when we were auditioning Joeys: someone who was an actor first and foremost. It came down to two guys. One was a fabulously experienced musical-theatre pro, an American triple-threat singer-dancer-actor of the kind that at the time the UK didn’t produce in the quantities it does now. The other was a young actor, Russell Boulter, who could sing and dance ok and who would work hard to get as good as he could get. We went with Russell.
He did indeed work his socks off, but in the end the problem remained as it was in that Half Moon production, which I’d seen all those years before. It had been an interesting take on the material, and worked well most of the time, but, whatever the ambiguities of the novel, the show was written for Joey to be played by a first-rate dancer. The end of the first act, unquestionably meant to be an exhilarating dance number, couldn’t help but fall a little flat, leaving Denis Lawson, and Russell, somewhat exposed, whatever their strengths as actors.
All in all, though, our production was well received. The company was friendly and committed, and boasted two wonderful performers, Ian Gelder and Sara Weymouth, in the main supporting roles. The band sounded grand, although, sad to say, after the first band call we’d had to fire the drummer when he revealed he couldn’t read music. He was by no means a weak musician; given a couple of weeks, he could have learned the part by ear with some dedicated coaching..But, due to the time pressures necessitated by repertory theatre budgets, the musicians needed to be ready to go through the music with the actors after what amounted to a sight-read, single play-through. So, in came a reader, who saved the day.
The nicest thing to come out of the production from my point of view was that the associate director was Matthew Warchus, not long out of university, and clearly going far.
