After two musical adaptations of The Great Gatsby in the last three years, maybe it was inevitable that musical theatre, hungry for a further Fitzgerald fix, would turn to the life of its author F Scott and his wife Zelda. With music and lyrics by American performer Hannah Corneau and a book by Mona Mansour, Beautiful Little Fool tells the story of American literature’s most celebrated and chaotic couple through the exasperated lens of their daughter Frances, an anguished Lauren Ward, as she sifts through their archive on her forty-eighth birthday, having outlived both of her parents – F Scott died aged 46, Zelda aged 47.
An impressive set (by Shankho Chaudhuri) fills Southwark Playhouse’s main space, shelves stuffed with books and boxes, staircases sweeping up to a second level. There’s money here, and there’s promise, and there’s a legendary Broadway director, Michael Greif, who helmed the original productions of Rent, Dear Evan Hansen and Next To Normal.
But it all fizzles out so quickly. Because it’s narrated by Frances, the entire musical feels told and not shown, like a Wikipedia page with songs. And those songs rarely earn their place. Corneau’s music is pleasant, but rarely strays beyond four-chord pop. Songs swell with Adam Rothenberg’s rich orchestrations - drum fills, plaintive piano chords, humming bass lines - and when they’re matched with harmonies from the performers it all sounds quite nice. Little flashes of interest come when Corneau breaks away from genericism and modulates unexpectedly, but the songs don’t really take us anywhere in terms of plot or character progression, and they rarely reveal anything about the people singing them.
Lyrics fit awkwardly over the freewheeling melodies. For some reason, almost every song starts with a declarative line which is then repeated two or three times. Platitudes are plenty: ‘he stands so tall, he covers up the truth of how my words inspire it all’. Corneau’s words are so odd, so oblique and empty, with no sense of scansion or rhythm, and wedged-in references to the Fitzgeralds’ works (‘the truth is funny, like a green light across the water’/ ‘you’re beautiful and you’re damned’) sounding a bit GCSE.
Although Corneau is listed as playing Zelda too, it’s understudy Amy Parker who takes on the role on press night, and she’s very much the standout. She brings a bit of complexity to an otherwise flattened character. David Hunter has little to play with as F Scott, and plays little with it. Ward at least shows emotion as Frances and when the show has substance, it’s to do with the impact of the Fitzgeralds’ wild living on their daughter. The other two cast members, Jasmine Hackett and David Austin Barnes, are slightly superfluous. They play underwritten roles - Zelda’s mum, who has about three lines; a hotel clerk, one line – and bolster the singing.
Vaguely, Corneau and Mansour gesture towards the fact that F Scott used Zelda’s writing under his own name; that she may have driven him to drink, and he may have driven her to a psychiatric hospital. One moment has their daughter scream about how it’s bad that unconventional women get locked up. But they don’t attempt to explore these ideas - or anything else - in any meaningful way. Quickly, a pat ending swoops in telling us that Zelda and F Scott were really in love, and love is great.
These are legendary lives diminished by being squashed into a musical, pulled out of time by the score. Beautiful Little Fool takes all the glamour, the outrageousness, the cleverness, the vitality, the fights, the drinking, the intensity of the lives that F Scott and Zelda lived and reduces them to schmaltz.
