Review: ONE MAN MUSICAL, Underbelly Boulevard

If sacred cows make the best burgers, Underbelly Soho could soon become the most popular fast food joint around. One Man Musical’s latest outing is quickly becoming something of a word-of-mouth must-see and, while the marketing is understandably coy about who the “one man” is, it becomes clear early on that cabaret duo Flo & Joan have come not to praise Andrew Lloyd Webber but to hilariously bury him in his own faintly ridiculous history.

Sisters Nicola and Rosie Dempsey have been performing as Flo & Joan for around a decade and, in that time, they have gone from being word-of-mouth hits on the Edinburgh Fringe to receiving death threats for a TV ad they made for Nationwide Building Society before appearing the following year on the Royal Variety Performance. Joining forces with actor and comedian George Fouracres, this latest effort has all the makings of an instant classic.

The central conceit - that one of musical theatre’s leading lights has become tired of writing about Jesus, Joseph and Evita and has decided to turn the spotlight on himself - is patently ridiculous but rendered here utterly plausible. The ribbing is merciless even if there’s something of a slow start. As sing in “A Most Unusual Boy”, the jabs at his privileged upbringing - growing up in South Kensington building his toy version of the London Palladium before attending the local public school (Westminster, which currently charges a mere £15k per term per pupil) - are fairly tame. 

The real fun starts when he meets lyricist Tim Rice (“he looked like a rock god, I looked like a rock collector”) who - in an act of apparently typical pettiness - is represented on stage by a bag of basmati rice. There’s a roll call of the musicals the pair created like Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat before the attention turns to the feline in the room. Cats was a phenomenon in the early Eighties but - as depicted in the song “P-U-S-S-Y” - it is now better known by its much-derided 2019 film adaptation. 

Front and centre as the composer is Fouracres displaying the kind of physical comedy chops that haven’t been seen in the capital since Daniel Rigby’s turn in Accidental Death of An Anarchist. It’s a superb performance that sees him throw himself into the role wholeheartedly, sending up the composer’s warbling tones and other verbal mannerisms when not jumping about with a vigour that would be impressive for a man half Lloyd Webber’s age. Audience members are engaged in deliberately awkward chit chat with even the most basic of answers involving a stream of esoteric trivia. 

He fantastically delivers the Dempseys’ wickedly sharp lyrics and dialogue, packed with well-researched facts and with plenty of the great man’s “subtle bitchiness”. There’s many a poke at Lloyd Webber’s wealth whether it is in connection to his reserved demeanour (“I give the vibe of a man who lives with his mummy but mummy is dead so I live with my money” he sings) or musical theatre legends (he archly laments the show’s shoestring budget “albeit shoestrings from custom-made shoes of imported Italian leather pulled from Patti LuPone’s back”). 

The intro rhetorically asks “Is this a legal minefield? Yes, it is!” but, while some of what is stated here is scandalous, none of it is slanderous. One Man Musical has already appeared at the Fringe and a couple of months ago at Soho Theatre so the notoriously litigious subject has had plenty of time to intervene.

This could work in his favour; perhaps Lloyd Webber is sitting back in a stuffed armchair in a private members club or (more likely) one of his grand properties pondering whether the free publicity from One Man Musical could help sell more tickets to his long-running Phantom Of The Opera, the recent revival of the updated Starlight Express or the two Jamie Lloyd-directed productions he has on the go (Sunset Boulevard on Broadway and the upcoming comeback of Evita at the London Palladium, one of the six West End theatres he owns or co-owns) as well as the much-anticipated immersive version of Phantom arriving off-Broadway sometime in 2025.

There’s also a potted history of Lloyd Webber’s relationships including his first wife Sarah Hugill (they met when he was 21 and she was, in the words of his memoir, “a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl”) who he left for his second wife Sarah Brightman (who is called here Sarah Two). And, given that he possesses far larger venues, the Underbelly itself is pilloried. When not moaning about having to perform in “a disinfected strip club-cum-spaceship”, he takes aim at the seating saying “if I wanted to sit on something orange and squeaky, I’d call Bonnie Langford”.

This could all go one of three ways for One Man Musical. The most probable is that - in the grand tradition - the show will go on before Flo & Joan find a new icon to lampoon while Lloyd Webber focuses on his current slate of theatrical projects, expanding his property portfolio and finding new ways to embellish his legacy. Or the lawyers could eventually be called in and everything gets shut down very quickly and very quietly.

A more tempting option is for the Dempseys to write a sequel. The ending comes with the opening of Phantom in 1986 and skips lightly over the intervening years. That’s a shame as its much-maligned follow-up Love Never Dies has all the makings of a comedy just on its own. Mockingly renamed by critics Paint Never Dries, disaster first struck when Lloyd Webber's six-month-old kitten climbed onto his digital piano and managed to delete the entire score, forcing him to reconstruct it from scratch. In place of Rice, the search for a lyricist went on a curious journey: spy author Frederick Forsyth was considered for a while then comedian and novelist Ben Elton (never a good sign) and finally Glenn Slater who initially thought that the project “just sounded like a terrible idea”. 

Meanwhile, ambitious plans to simultaneously open in the UK, US and Asia disastrously fell apart and a decision to paint the front of the Grade II-listed Adelphi black as a publicity stunt backfired when the producers were threatened by the local authority with a fine of up to £20,000. The final stroke was the critical backlash on both sides of the pond: New York Times' Ben Brantley felt sorry for “this poor sap of a show” and Quentin Letts lambasted “a death scene so long that it may only reignite the euthanasia debate”.

I look forward to seeing How Do You Solve A Problem Like Andrew? in the near future.

Read our interview with writers Flo & Joan here.

One Man Musical continues at Underbelly Boulevard until 2 March.

Photo credit: Avalon

 

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