Miss Nightingale at Hippodrome, review - plucky new musical is worth a punt
I’m not exhorting people to go forth and gamble but anyone over the age of 18 who finds themselves in the centre of town with time to spare really should pop along to the Hippodrome.
After this Frank Matcham-designed palace of pleasure was re-opened as a casino in 2012, it looked like its status as a West End theatrical venue had ended. Yet the conversion was done with such sophisticated and lavish finesse that even as it provides London’s answer to Las Vegas it also gives a magnificent sense of what the space was once like: you can picture the circus spectacles of yesteryear.
Seek out the 180-seat cabaret upstairs, and this month you’re further provided with a costlier but less Mammonite proposition. Miss Nightingale, Matthew Bugg’s original musical set in Blitz-worn London, has done the rounds since it premiered at North London's King’s Head pub theatre in 2011 . Given that it’s about a plucky singer-entertainer in the Gracie Fields mould, has it now found its ideal home in the Hippodrome, which launched in 1900 with a music-hall revue featuring Charlie Chaplin?
After a fashion. Although the ambience is perfect, the evening has been stretched beyond its original 90 minutes to more than two hours, adding songs but little in the way of dramatic depth or roll-up, roll-up excitement. A production this intimate – a cast of six actor-musicians – craves a wham-bam-thank-you ma’am intensity. But Bugg - who also directs, and acts – appears not to have heeded earlier criticism that the piece needed tightening. While there’s no doubting the committed nature of the company, or the accomplishment of the score, which pastiches styles of the era – a hint of Weimar here, a dash of Coward there, lots of cheeky-chappy, innuendo-laden ditties in between – a sense of déjà vu and deja heard sets in, as Miss Nightingale is endlessly put through her paces.
As the spirited northerner, Lauren Chinery has enough charisma and elan to keep you watching all the same, gradually finding her stage-confidence and finally refusing to settle for her bruiser, black-mailer of a boyfriend. This independent-minded lass has a lovely bit of comic business that seems to have been inspired by the mislaid eye-glass routine of silly-ass wartime comedian Ralph Lynn, and elsewhere an impressive degree of research shines through. Miss N’s best friend, the Polish Jewish refugee George (Matthew Floyd Jones), and her club’s effete aristocratic owner Frank (Oliver Mawdsley) get engaged in a furtive homosexual liaison that reflects the period’s aggressive prejudices and there’s even a sobering mention of the Telegraph’s 1942 scoop about Hitler’s gas-chambers. Cut it down and maybe tart it up, too, and it could finally be the palpable hit it deserves to be.
Until May 6. Tickets: 020 7769 8888; www.missnightingale.co.uk
