OK, let me be up front about this. I love the score of Betty Blue Eyes, the musical that has just opened at The Union Theatre in that venue’s first in-house production since before Covid.
I’ve loved the score ever since I first heard the CD A Spoonful of Stiles and Drewe; George and Ants have a real way of capturing Brittishness in song form. I bet I could sing most of the songs from it straight through.
And yet…and yet…it doesn’t work as a show. It grieves me to say it, but it’s one of that collection of shows like Paint Your Wagon, or Pal Joey that in spite of a score full of great musical numbers is lumbered with a dog of a book.
Don’t get me wrong, Cowne and Lipman write some nice moments, and their dialogue is snappy, period, and often laugh-out-loud funny. It’s just that the structure isn’t there to make the show flow properly and in musical theatre – well commercial musical theatre anyway – structure is everything.
The problem is, the tangible and intangible wants are in two different people, and an audience just can’t invest in two places at once.
What’s more of a surprise to me is that, given that she show closed in the west End in 2011, the team behind it haven’t crawled over broken glass to fix it. I would have done if it as mine. Perhaps there are copyright issues? Who knows?
What I DO know is that this production has bigger problems. But first…the positives…
This is a great (and HUGE under 18) cast for The Union.
Sam Kipling in particular as Gilbert Chilvers is a wonder, and a shoo-in if they ever make a live action version of Wallace and Gromit. He’s certainly considerably more likeable than Reece Shearsmith ever was in the original.
Elsewhere David Pendlebury as meat inspector Wormold clearly relishes his part as the arch baddie of the piece, and is a joy in his every scene.
Josh Perry as Henry Allardyce is genuinely affecting as the accountant who has fallen for Betty. And the pig herself, in puppet form, is cute enough.
The union is tiny. We know that. But, I still would question some of the perverse staging decisions. For a start, Betty is quite often at floor level in front of the front row…meaning nobody gets to see her who isn’t sitting on the front row…
Similarly, it’s great to try and utilise all the space available by having a double height set, but really, if you’re expecting people to look up at characters, don’t have lights beaming at the audience immediately behind them.
There was a lot of work from the fog machine going on… so much work in fact that the atmosphere in the theatre managed to leak out and set off the fire alarms in the bar next door!
To end on some positives. The band of just 3 sounded great under the assured baton on Aaron Clingham. The venue is still clean, welcoming, well staffed, and friendly. I’ll certainly be going back, but perhaps not for this show.
On a final point… Another of those shows with a terrible book but a wonderful score is Lerner and Loewe’s follow up to My Fair Lady, Camelot, which as I write is previewing in New York with a new book by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that we may yet see a Betty Blue Eyes that really works.