Review Roundup: DEAR WORLD with Betty Buckley and Paul Nicholas

Michael Billington from the Guardian writes: Betty Buckley, whom I last saw in Promises, Promises half a lifetime ago, lends the heroine the right air of dreamy dottiness, as if still inhabiting the Paris of the Belle Epoque. There is good support from Paul Nicholas as a benevolent sewerman, Peter Land as a leanly rapacious capitalist and Annabel Leventon as a park-bench habitue who hears more voices than Joan of Arc. It is not one of those Broadway failures like Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle that quickly acquires cult status, but Lynne stylishly evokes a fantasy Paris, and it's hard not to warm to a show that suggests corporate greed and environmental destruction can be actively resisted.

Our own Sarah Flinton of BWW says: Director Gillian Lynne's spectacular choreography adds even more humour and fun to an already energetic story; while the elegant interpretations of ballads by the cast, most notably Katy Treharne as the romantic lead Nina, ensures the portrayal of emotion.

Fourthwall Magazine writes: The score is stupendous from the get-go though. I'd never heard a note of it and could hum you great swathes and that's before I downloaded the original Broadway cast recording this morning; Angela Lansbury stars, bonus! Betty Buckley stars here (double bonus) as a warm and wonderful, cookie Countess Aurelia. There's a moment in Act 2 when the Julian of Stuart Matthew Price (top of his game, again) descends the stars holding a feather boa before role-playing Emile, the lost love of the Countess. I turned to the woman next to me and said, "Wow, what a scene!" I wonder who she was? We're all going mad. She did agree, though.

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