If you want to put a smile on your face, head down the Union for its pocket-sized revival of ‘The Pajama Game’, the Adler and Ross musical that incongruously mixes love with labour relations. All you need to know about the plot is that Sid Sorokin, the thrusting young superintendent at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory, falls for Babe Williams, the icy head of the grievance committee, but Babe says she can’t truly love him while he opposes the union’s demand for a seven per cent cent raise (it’s the 1950s, remember).
It is a real treat to see the Fosse-inspired choreography strut its stuff in such a small space – not so much the bowler-hat-and-knickers sauce of ‘Steam Heat’ as the fluid leaping and weaving of songs like ‘Once a Year Day’, when the sheer number of dancers per square foot seems to demand collision and disaster. Which absolutely doesn’t materialise.
With a small, flexible band half hidden behind clothes rails, Sasha Regan’s production, spryly directed by Thom Southerland, benefits from some fine singing – and if you’re a fan of musicals, it’s always a treat to see the magic happen a mere six feet away. Best of the bunch is Graham Weaver as Sorokin. Last seen at the Union (in a dress) in Southerland’s all-male ‘HMS Pinafore’, here he proves himself a perfectly dishy leading man. ‘There Once Was a Man’, his duet with Babe (Kate Nelson, though I saw understudy Stephanie Nielson) is another highlight. There are a couple of weak songs – the famous ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ isn’t quite the showstopper it should be – but the fun and exuberance of the whole thing makes this another song-and-dance winner for the Union.
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Please be weary of map (above). The address of the Theatre is Union St but the map is showing Becket / Great Dover St