High Society is, of course, a pure joy, a ludicrously frothy Golden Age Cole Porter stage musical that has a plot you could blow over with a feather, plus some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime’, ‘Well Did You Evah’, ‘Let’s Misbehave’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – the banger level is off the chart.
But at the risk of being an old bore, my biggest problem with this new Barbican Cole Porter revival is that five years ago the Barbican did another Cole Porter revival that was simply much better. Admittedly, the 2021 production of Anything Goes – which was brought back the following year – really benefitted from London opening up from the pandemic before New York, meaning the show was stocked with stratospheric Broadway talent, notably director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and world-class musical theatre star Sutton Foster.
And this is, by comparison is… a really adequate production from Rachel Kavanaugh. The Brit director has gathered together a perfectly agreeable group of stage actors who nicely animate this story of a love pentagon between boozy good-time divorcee Tracy Lord (Helen George), her ex-husband Dexter Haven (Julian Ovendon), her fiancé George Kitteridge (David Seaton-Young), and undercover reporters Mike Connor (Freddie Fox) and Liz Imbrie (Carly Mercedes Dyer).
In an unashamedly retro production, Ovendon is the standout as Dexter, charismatic in a way that’s both rakish and rueful, and with a beautifully mannered voice that really nails the ’30s romance of it all.
Fox makes a very solid musical theatre debut: his voice is decent rather than revelatory but he handles the comedy very well indeed, which is good as he has to spend the second half extravagantly drunk.
On the whole, though, I wasn’t blown away. In the lead role of Tracy, Call the Midwife star George can sing, dance and act – but she’s only okay at the first two, a triple mild nuisance rather than actual threat. Maybe it’s unfair to compare her to Foster’s Olympian turn in Anything Goes but I think the want of that show’s jaw-droppingly acrobatic dance sequences point to the fact that this sort of extremely old school musical needs a lot of razzle dazzle to keep it going: we should absolutely not be left so free of distractions we ever stop to think about the plot or the paper thin characterisation.
Here the choreography – by Anthony van Laast – just doesn’t hit that hard, restrained rather than exuberant, with only a couple of sequences that really get going and even then they never find the top gear you’d like.
That all accepted, it is fun, and with songs as good as these and a cast who can all at least act well, it’s hardly a total fixer-upper. It’s a very nice evening at the theatre - but it’s overshadowed by a production that was a proper event.
