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It’s a seductive slice of saucy Soho history: a wealthy, elderly widow buys an ailing theatre and drives it to success through the 1930s and the Blitz by offering a taboo-busting repertoire of naked dancers who let it all hang out while keeping their bodies still – so holding the censor at bay. That’s the story of London’s Windmill Theatre. This new lightweight and crowd-pleasing musical version of the tale (first told in a buoyant 2005 Stephen Frears film with Judi Dench as Mrs Henderson and Bob Hoskins as her theatrical manager Vivian Van Damm) is lively and charming to a point but also glaringly skin deep.
As a putting-on-a-show farce, ‘Mrs Henderson Presents’ is energetic and amusing for most of the first act, switching nimbly between backstage and front-of-house views and relying on some hoary old slapstick involving planks of wood and rolled-up carpets. Tracie Bennett is warmly imperious as Mrs Henderson, Ian Bartholomew is a grounded presence as old hand Van Damm and a nervy Jamie Foreman breaks the fourth wall as a ringmaster of sorts, a vaudeville comic throwing terrible gags at the audience. There’s a terrific comic song in the Lord Chamberlain’s office. The ensemble of female dancers are endearing enough, yet they’re given short shrift as actual characters beyond one, Maureen (Emma Williams), whose romantic sub-plot develops from a yawn to a shrug.
It's packed with hoofing and songs. But once the clothes come off, you don't know where to look, and not because of embarrassment: the show’s creator and director, Terry Johnson, plays his best card too early and spends the rest of the night looking for something less shallow to explore beyond gracefully bare bums and exposed nipples. A late belter – ‘If mountains were easy to climb!’ – fails to knot the show’s disparate strands into a unifying message: life, like the show, must go on. The show leans far too heavily on nudity and a wearying brand of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ nostalgia, with an emphasis on the ‘Carry On’. You half-expect to see Sid James pop his head round the curtain and wink at the audience.