Review: DOODLE - THE MUSICAL!, Waterloo East Theatre

New musical comedies are not easy to get right - but they are not quite as tricky as this misguided production would have you believe.

We're in Britain's darkest hour and things go from bad to worse when eccentric boffin, Barnes Wallis is spirited away to Germany to develop a bouncing U-boat / doodlebug hybrid not to bust dams, but to bounce from the Palace of Westminster, to Buckingham Palace and on to Downing Street. Wallis has also invented a "rubbish robot" to whom he is attached. It's a thin premise on which to hang a show.

The Top Brass don't care for Wallis and so assemble the least likely troupe of bunglers to "rescue" him who... well, I guess you can fill in the blanks from here.

Whilst I accept that comedy has, to some extent, deal with stereotypes, do we have to have quite so many? The generals are out-of-touch upper class twits, their secretary a neglected, but brilliant, female strategist / commando, the Gestapo click-heeling masochists, the gays straight out of It Ain't Half Hot Mum and the robot, er... robotic. Surely we needed a little subversion of expectations to spice things up?

Buried in the mishmash, there are some good ideas from writer, Jonathan Kydd, but they're wantonly cast aside. Errol Flynn joins the snatch squad but is just as quickly sent back into the wings, never to reappear. David Niven, in his outfit a nice tribute to A Matter of Life and Death, is involved throughout, but does little beyond holding a champagne glass - he could be anyone posh. The writer's own father is included too, but seemingly only to play the spoons as a cookie-cutter cheerful Cockney.

Of more outré Pythonesque interjections like the assassin George Smiley (inexplicably nude) and the secret military group that meets in public toilets (and yes, you can guess what they're in for when the Old Bill turns up), the less said the better.

For all that, there's some good stuff struggling to break through. Andy Street has written some fine tunes and Sooz Henshaw has the pipes and comic timing to give them full value ( and rather shows up some of her colleagues for their lack of musical theatre technique). There's some strong video work demonstrating a more sure hand with tone than anything we see on stage. And the dancers, though technically not very good and primarily employed to effect the multiple quick changes required by the endless scene-changes, are endearingly, how to put this, reluctant, to be there.

As was I, because the final punchline of a show short of good ones, is that it comes in at a Hamiltonesque 160 minutes. There were times when I was genuinely praying that it would all be over by Christmas.

Doodle - The Musical! continues at Waterloo East Theatre until 28 January.

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