| The Shakespeare Review Vaudeville Theatre A slick package this: four all-singing, all-dancing, all-jesting actors and one pianist sing, dance, jest and forsooth their way through thirty-seven comic sketches and songs penned by the likes of Victoria Wood, Bernard Levin, Cole Porter and, in the words of the bard (well... maybe) many many more. The theme, as the title suggests, is the life and works of a well-known Elizabethan writer, the structure is music hall variety and the set, for reasons unclear, looks like some sort of Las Vegas funeral parlour. The players handle a difficult pace and a wide variety of demands on their abilities with high professionalism. The material, culled from such high pedigree sources, is often fairly sparky too. So why does the whole thing leave me with a mildly bad taste in my |
| mouth? I should say first that I did laugh a fair bit. You'd have to be a corpse not to at sketches like the Pythons' 'The Man Who Speaks in Anagrams' and Perry Pontac's 'And How is Hamlet?' Too often, though, the humour is eclipsed by smugness, giving the proceedings the feel of an annoyingly precocious school production. Matters are not helped by pieces like Maureen Lipman's leadenly unamusing 'PC or not PC' and the cloying ABAB rhyming of Jack Klaff's 'I'm in the RSC'. The latter compounds the felony by being peppered with boring thespian in-jokes, a fault that can be found with too much of the material here. In short, I wearied of these luvvies 'ere their time was up. Call me a jack'nape and a canker in a hedge, but I confess it, indeed, I have been merrier. |