A slightly laboured labour of love - Tiger Bay the Musical, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, review
The reason why Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera continue to run and run isn’t just because they’re supreme examples of theatrical spectacle and boast the kind of songs that kick open the portals to your memory and lodge there immovably. They also (thanks to Victor Hugo and Gaston Leroux) deliver the page-turning need to know what happens next. The music takes you deeper into the story, intensifies the emotions; the song is a bursting-forth of the drama.
Tiger Bay, a wildly (and laudably) ambitious new musical that strives to put on stage the toiling melting-pot community of late-Victorian Butetown, the dockside area of Cardiff integral to its industrial-age growth, sounds an awful lot like Les Mis. So much so, in fact, that I came out of the vast Wales Millennium Centre (which is situated in the very neighbourhood, now redeveloped, the piece alludes to) involuntarily humming “One Day More”. Those with a mind to playing “spot the musical influences” may well detect the borrowed weeds of other shows besides: a touch of Matilda here, a hint of Oliver! there; Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd too.
Much as I wanted the score by the plainly talented and destined-to-thrive Daf James to be more Old Land of My Fathers than Boublil-Schönberg – more home-grown magnificence than imported bombast – what hobbles the evening, aside from its three-hour length, is the attendantly flimsy, déjà-vu nature of its story.
For many of us, Tiger Bay and surrounding Butetown (the name derived after the second Marquess of Bute, whose obscenely rich, philanthropic-reclusive son we see here) will be terra incognita. Yet it feels as if we have been here before.
ASouth African hero called Themba has pitched up to seek his fortune against a background of labour unrest and local resentment towards immigrant workers. Even if the opening number, showing the back-breaking, coal-lugging lives of the “donkey-men” on the docks, doesn’t make you think of the opening growls of Les Mis, the confrontation between Themba and the slave-driving harbour-master O’Rourke, who turns out to be his Boer War nemesis, is pure Jean Valjean and Javert.
The pair lock rival amorous horns over shop-assistant Rowena – with the caddish O’Rourke also smitten with a dockside doxy. Throw in a pivotal whipper-snapper orphan and a gaggle of lost boys threatened with gruesome goings-on at sea, and if you weren’t also remembering Coram Boy, then the presence of Melly Still (who staged that novel at the NT) as co-director makes the connection.
In other words, although James and lyricist Michael Williams make strenuous efforts to chart a fresh course for musical theatre, they founder on the shallows of received ideas. The songs are often thrilling in themselves and technically move the story forwards, but with a whopping 30 numbers, the flaws are exposed – there’s a lot of grand emoting, but not enough going on beneath the surface.
If, given the running-time, it’s as much a pain in the butt as a beaut, how to explain the raves the show (presented with Cape Town Opera) received when it trialled in South Africa? Because the evening demands a measure of welcoming generosity and honest admiration. The vocal work of the principals – among them John Owen-Jones, playing the mournful, clairvoyant-consulting Marquess – is impeccable. The grubby urchins are, down to a cleverly disguised girl, full of vim. And what Anna Fleischle’s sombre set, with looming ship’s prow, lacks in colour is compensated for by waves of glittering orchestral splendour. Only a curmudgeon would deny that it tries terribly hard. Will it run and run, though? I’d be astounded.
Until Nov 25. Tickets: 029 2063 6464; www.wmc.org.uk
