Review: TONY! THE TONY BLAIR ROCK OPERA, Park Theatre

Attend The Tale Of Tony Blair!

Yes, the demon-eyed barbarous one of Downing Street (well, for some, but more of that later), gets a very Sondheimian opening number in this new rock opera and we strap in for the Life Of Tony, saviour/destroyer of the Labour Party. Harry Hill steers the book - and he gets his fair share of gags in - and music and lyrics writer, Steve Brown, nods towards The Who's Tommy, more than nods towards Gilbert and Sullivan's iconoclasm and even gives us a Hamiltonish set-piece battle. It's a pacy rollercoaster ride until they finish off with the kind of biting satirical song that Spitting Image would use to close in those far away days before Tony felt the hand of history on his shoulder.

It's all great fun, especially if you were around to see Clare Short not resigning, Neil Kinnock not winning and the man himself not losing. The first half is much the stronger, tracking the man's always somewhat bemused progress from public schoolboy to wannabe Mick Jagger at Oxford to the bolstering of his leftish credentials by Cherie to the Granita deal to divvy out power with the technocratic son of the manse, Gordon Brown.

Charlie Baker has a lot of fun with the familiar grins, the slippery principles and Blair's alchemical mastery of the ruthless brokering of charm into power. Wisely, he doesn't exactly impersonate Blair, but the rhythm of speech is dead right and so too the obsequiousness displayed towards those who can help him slither ever higher up the greasy pole.

Not least, Peter Mandelson, with whom Howard Samuels cranks the camp up to 11, staying just the right side of panto if note always the fourth wall. Holly Sumpton, though a little too keen on "Chuck" as an endearment, nails Cherie's accent perfectly (and posh Liverpool - no giggling at the back now - isn't an easy one to catch, though late period Cilla is a good starting point). Madison Swan is super too as a seductive Princess Diana and gets the zingiest of our fair share of zingers.

Rather like his premiership, some of the air goes out of the balloon in the second half. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and George W Bush turn up, but the Weapons of Mass Destruction do not, and both the stakes in show and the absence of many of the caricatures we met before the interval, sap the humour and bonhomie, the laughs now forcibly squeezed out of the narrative rather than arising more naturally.

Of course, it had to be done, the Blair legacy still controversial and contested ground, nicely summed up by Baker as Blair in a typically third way style, neither too congratulatory nor too condemnatory, a conclusion that will have as many calling it a whitewash as will hail it as a corrective and deserved endorsement.

This venue has done Boris Johnson and Geoffrey Howe in recent years, so Tony Blair was a natural progression. If it's a little broader in its comedy than those two productions, it gets more laughs. It needs to as this is a musical comedy in which the musical elements play second fiddle to the comic cuts - and no comedy lands every gag. At least this PM needed Harry Hill's writing and a stand-up comic's timing to transform him into a clown - the current incumbent needs no such assistance on that front.

Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera is at Park Theatre until 9 July

Image: Mark Douet

To post a comment, you must register and login.