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Matthew Iliffe’s production of this 2002 musical about the roaring ‘20s offers a burst of sleek hair bobs, jazzy steps and swinging flapper dresses. The staging, dancing and costumes are enough to make you want to do a spontaneous Charleston. The plot and songs, however, won’t leave you with quite the same spring in your step.
Adapted from the 1967 film starring Julie Andrews, ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie’ is set in bustling Manhattan during the prohibition era, a time when young women arrive in the city hoping to get their names in lights and you need to know a password to get into the drinking joints. Millie arrives from Kansas, determined to become a modern woman – she’s looking for a rich husband at all costs including love. ‘Marriage is a business transaction,’ she explains.
The story, based originally on a British musical called ‘Chrysanthemum’, is a cloyingly condescending journey to prove that Millie’s denouncement of love is utter tosh. A rich husband you may have, but if there’s no love, it ain’t gonna work – which is probably true, but surely the sassy Millie’s got brains enough to work that out for herself. With its bunch of clueless, naive women, all desperate to get hitched, get rich or get famous, the story is horribly dated.
It doesn’t help that the final plot twists – which make everything All Right – are pretty implausible. And then there’s the most panto villain this side of Christmas. Mrs Meers is the hotel owner pretending to be Chinese (here with a horribly dodgy accent) who sells young unsuspecting ladies that arrive at her hotel into white slavery. It’s really dark, but it’s delivered with a distasteful upbeat punchiness.
Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan’s songs are forgettable, but the cast deliver them well. Francesca Lara Gordon as Millie is great, all surreptitious half-smiles and smoky looks. Millie is the strongest woman in a lame bunch and Gordon makes it impossible not to warm to her. Sam Spencer Lane’s choreography is also a treat, jazzy, jumpy, filled with energy, the stage works best when the entire cast are flapping and flitting their way through a number. The production is beguiling, it’s just a pity that the musical itself is not.