Once Upon a Time At The Adelphi, Playhouse, Liverpool
Monday, 7 July 2008
A fluid line-up of song and dance numbers, with an MGM verve and velocity to "Show Tune" and "Once in a Lifetime", boasts a lusty refrain in "Liverpool's time has come again", which must be the hope for everyone connected with Capital of Culture.
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The Adelphi has iconic status in Liverpool. Hollywood stars brought their glamour and some seedier aspects to the city's swankiest hotel, as their luxury liners docked in the port before the Second World War.
The European Capital of Culture has gifted itself a musical on some of the stories and characters associated with what is now the Britannia Adelphi, written and directed by Phil Willmott with musical direction by Elliot Davis. An entertaining tale of Liverpudlian love, it sees ghosts interacting with living characters – which is less naff than it sounds.
On a fabulous gleaming revolve, polished rails and Art Deco angles with marble floors and platforms, the set looks every bit a grand hotel in Christopher Woods's design.
The 15-strong company, partly filled by tall, elegant hoofers and singers from Liverpool's Institute of Performing Arts, takes on a wide variety of characters, costume changes and accents with cheerful commitment. It's led by Julie Atherton who, with her crystalline voice ringing – as opposed to belting out – her numbers, inhabits the lead role of the younger Alice with a touching humanity. Playing opposite her is Simon Bailey (of boy band Teatro) as her wide-boy lover, Thompson. Caught between a dodgy past and a hopeful future, he occasionally looks detached from the proceedings but not in the snappily choreographed "Thompson from Accounts".
The ditties are witty with plenty of local references, the action keeps rolling and the period is perfectly evoked in the dapper tailoring. The climax bombs, you might say, with horrible realism. Myth and folklore are dragged in, and though cowboy hero Roy Rogers really did check in – with Trigger, his horse, sharing his room – the suggestion that the German kitchen boy might have been Adolf Hitler (who, it has been claimed, worked there) seems a bit far-fetched.
Helen Carter stands out as the larger-than-life, ballsy Scouse chambermaid, clutching her dream of bedding and wedding a millionaire. Natasha Seale makes an animated older Alice and Neil McCaul, as a Hollywood producer, produces one of the darker moments, his sleazy "Dance for me boy", in an otherwise determinedly upbeat score.
A fluid line-up of song and dance numbers, with an MGM verve and velocity to "Show Tune" and "Once in a Lifetime", boasts a lusty refrain in "Liverpool's time has come again", which must be the hope for everyone connected with Capital of Culture.
Once Upon a Time at the Adelphi, the first ever musical at the Playhouse, is a remarkable achievement and, though by no means flawless, demonstrates its management's unerring instinct for backing a winner.
'Once Upon a Time at the Adelphi' runs to 2 August (0151-709 4776)
