Adapting the classics into musicals is often a thankless exercise. Purists are irked at the temerity and everyone else would rather be at ‘Shrek’. But veterans Howard Goodall and Charles Hart do a splendid job of remounting the tangled web of class confusion, inter-generational conflict and astringent avarice of Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy of middle-class manners, ‘She Stoops to Conquer’.
It’s All Fools’ Eve, and in a carnival of misconduct, three young couples attempt to steal and deceive their way to happiness. Two must defy parental strictures, while the third, and the play’s lodestone, is the singular fable of an heiress who must pretend to be a servant to seduce her class-constrained suitor.
Director Lotte Wakeham handles her vivacious ensemble cast with vim, navigating the show’s circuitous story with welcome wit and self-conscious bravura. Goodall’s choral, contrapuntal score delivers exquisite, if gentle, aural pleasures, and Hart’s tinkering with the original tale works well.
The design, sadly, is weak, the filial relationships are badly undernourished, and relocating this quintessentially eighteenth-century tale to the Edwardian era proves unwise and unenlivening. But
with a deal more refinement this hugely enjoyable, jaunty fringe musical might conquer far larger stages.