Departing Young Vic artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah’s directorial swansong is a musical version of the eponymous 1957 film written by Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) and directed by Elia Kazan, both once members of the Communist Party in America.
Kwei-Armah recently admitted to hating musicals once upon a time, preferring “the deep shit”, so I expected some edge to the satire. But, he adds now, “I love that people inhale the joy that comes from music”. Music a sweetener to obscure, or help this cautionary parable of demagoguery slip down? Seems to work. The audience is with it the whole way, waving American flags (handed to those who want them), cheering a salt-of-the earth populist, clapping, feet tapping.
Point proven: how easy it is to fall for empty charm. A charismatic, uneducated drifter and chancer with guitar from small town Riddle (not real), Lonesome Rhodes, found in an Arkansas jail by local community radio producer Marcia Jeffries seeking ‘real’ people for her morning show. She thinks she has struck lucky, but he turns out to be a poisoned chalice.
The ‘ordinary’ people love him and his unfiltered hillbilly philosophy. He stars on TV in Chicago and then the Ed Sullivan show in New York. Advertisers and politicians come to him for help to sell their goods. He is game for anything, fame goes to his head; Marcia has created a monster. Even she fell for his plain-speaking ways. And isn’t television built on fairy tales?
He is like a child in a sweet shop. He marries baton-twirling competition winner Betty Lou on television. He even proposes being VP to the presidential candidate. Politics and showbiz, what’s the difference? Opinionated, chauvinistic, racist, his campaigning slogan is "Blood and Hot Sauce": this is America. America will go it alone. It’s the Wild West with its gun mentality.
From empathetic to evangelical, his wild words run away with him. He and the ensemble whip up the audience. See how easy it is, how gullible we can be, swept along on the wave of euphoria… But his man-of-the-people shtick is revealed by the woman who unwittingly set him, her “intellectual property”, loose. He is dropped like a hot brick.
Do we vote with our brains or emotions? Music is emotion: it gets under the skin, another manipulator. Elvis Costello’s country style music and lyrics, ranging from advert jingles, folksy ballads, torch songs, female trios, barbershop quartet and ‘Hank Williams’ blues, buoys the production and at the same time slows it down, softens the bite. The “Face in the Crowd” refrain is catchy.
Ramin Karimloo is perfect casting as Lonesome, with charisma to spare, playing all the nuances of his character—there’s even a Stanley Kowalski moment when he shouts for Marcia. Anoushka Lucas as Marcia has the harder role: she is both narrator and player in a drama of her own making, a learning curve. She survives to tell the tale.
Emily Florence is not just a silly blonde, Betty Lou, but has shrewd plans of her own, networking her way to a spot on television by seducing Lonesome’s agent, talent scout Joey dePalma (Stavros Demetraki), who holds all the cards. She even looks like the young Lee Remick in the film.
Olly Dobson as writer Mel Miller (Walter Matthau a hard act to follow) has too little to do and is a bit one-dimensional. Writer Sarah Ruhl has trimmed some roles, many just walk-ons. But the ensemble (choreography Lizzie Gee) is fabulous, taking on many parts at the drop of a cue.
Anna Fleischle’s set is fifties cartoonish, costumes brilliant in their evocation of televisual pastiche, whilst Jackie Shemesh’s lighting complements her concept. And the onstage band—Phil Bateman, Tim Goodyer, Laura Manship, Jo Nichols, Seb Philpott, Allan Simpson—is great.
Lonesome is not Woody Guthrie or Hank Williams, though it’s music of that era that one hears. Elvis Costello’s music is enticing, infectious, softening what should have been a biting satire not just of the present political climate. Lenin reached out to the illiterate and uneducated with agitprop trains; Lonesome is a one-man agitprop, what we’d call an influencer today.
Power and flattery corrupt. And people are sheep. How did he get to the top of the heap from being a down-and-out? For director Kwei-Armah, the musical “asks whether we get the governments we deserve”.
I’m not sure everyone in the audience is picking up on that. It is just entertainment, not real… who wouldn't fall for Karimloo’s Lonesome? Lights up; he steps out into the stalls, as his acolytes parade up and down the aisles with placards battering us with song and persuasion: a Texas political rally.