Review: BBC MUSICALS NIGHT, BBC Four and iPlayer

We open on Musicals: The Greatest Show with Sheridan Smith telling us how we’ve missed those nights out in the theatre. Unusually forthright social commentary on the cost-of-living crisis, I thought. But the musicians are standing in the house, two seats apart, in an echoey empty London Palladium and it dawns on me - it’s the dark days of Covid, now 40, sorry, five years in the past.

La Smith gives it full gas on “Don’t Rain On My Parade” but, perhaps appropriately, she can’t quite do the breath control required by Jule Styne’s almost cruel phrasing and the show, indeed the evening, rather limps into life.

Things improve with the (now) overly familiar story of what SIX is all about - but it’s a useful reminder of just how good Toby and Lucy are at writing MT songs. Elaine and Idina talk about the nation’s top ten songs, all too briefly, as they’ve some good tales to tell. And we cut to a bit of belt from Nicole Raquel Dennis with a huge Dreamgirls finish and… silence. Covid times were strange days indeed.

It’s all a little bloodless until Lea Solonga turns up on Zoom to deliver the best “I Dreamed A Dream” I’ve heard, sung with operatic emotion and clinical precision, showing yet again that it’s never the medium, it’s always the talent (well, mostly). The programme proves as much an artefact of social anthropology as it does entertainment - there’s Ph.Ds to be done on stuff like this. 

On to some very 80s graphics and an 80s era Terry Wogan with his Les Dawson-lite self-deprecation and a Follies special. Only Julia McKenzie is still with us, Pearl Carr, Teddy Johnson, Diana Rigg, Dolores Gray and Steve Sondheim himself, all gone. The cliché says that their work makes them immortal and, well, that’s the thing about clichés - they’re true.

Sondheim is, as ever, compelling when he talks about his work, generous in his praise of others and wholly unwilling to compromise his proffered analysis and vision for a primetime audience. Like many a creative genius, he speaks quickly and one can imagine an impatience and a quick judgement, if not quite as much as Lenny Bernstein revealed. Chat show stuff from the stars until Dolores Gray brings the house down with “I’m Still Here”, in many ways the quintessential Sondheim number. If such a thing exists…

More Follies, as we revisit a 1986 documentary tracking the 1985 New York concert starring Lee Remick, George Hearn, Barbara Cook and Mandy Patinkin - not that it stops Elaine Strich demanding our full attention whenever the camera or the microphone is anywhere near! Genuine Broadway legends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, pitch up as performers rather than songwriters (Steve has a good contacts book) lending an authenticity to the show’s bittersweet nostalgic theme.

At 90 minutes, much of it backstage, this might be one for the hardcore MT fans. It doesn’t reveal that much because (and this is the delight of Follies of course) they’re all such old hands that they can just do this stuff. Not easily - musicals are never easy, even in concert - but there’s not much jeopardy here, even if the clock is ticking over the four days rehearsal time like it’s a task on The Apprentice. After all, they’re not doing Anyone Can Whistle. Ultimately, any concert version of a musical is a shadowplay that cannot capture its parent show and leaves you pleased to hear the songs, but displeased to be missing out on the actual, you know, thing.

A dip into the vaults next for a selection of performances of Sondheim’s songs, starting with a stunning “Somewhere” by Renee Fleming and Alfie Boe from a balcony at Buckingham Palace at the Jubilee celebrations. We didn’t know in 2012 that it probably was that Somewhere for many of us.

I learned more (a few years ago now) about MT from the next snippet, when Steve, at the piano, explains the recurring melodic motifs from Into The Woods, something we feel instinctively in the house as music underpins character. Often a letting of light into the dim, lonely rooms in which writers work can be disappointing, vague and inaccessible, a sharp contrast to the blaze we see on stage in the finished piece. Not so this time.

As you would expect, Lenny turns up conducting a recording of West Side Story and Steve repeats his often aired self-criticism of his lyrics - well they sound pretty good when a fresh-faced Michael Ball belts out “Maria”.

Black and white TV it may be, but we’re treated to a glorious technicolor Broadway old school performance from Ethel Merman going to 11 on “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”. They don’t make ‘em like that any more. Eartha Kitt absolutely kills “I’m Still Here” - they threw away the mould with her too! Liza, with the wonderful Pet Shop Boys collaboration on “Losing My Mind” , gives far, far more than Top of the Pops deserves, funny and heroic in its own way. And she looks fantastic!

In case we’re wondering about Steve’s reputation for making life difficult for his singers, Sophie Thompson delivers “Getting Married Today” with its blizzard of words all to be sung exactly on the note, as if William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan had ingested some speed before writing a patter song.

The A listers keep coming and, with the subtitles recommended, so too do those clever, clever rhymes. We finish a superb, if somewhat narrow, selection of work with Dame Judi’s “Send In The Clowns” - what a high point to complete a delightful and educational 90 minutes!    

Another compilation within a compilation closes the evening with a series of interview clips from the 70s mainly, the likes of Fred Astaire, Barbra Steisand and Liza again, probably the evening’s MVP. It’s all very stiff, very white and very male and it’s strange to see so many people smoking - different days. The interviews are too brief and the snippets of songs too short to explore satisfactorily either the performers or the films.

Given the vast archive of the BBC (that licence payers have already funded once) it’s disappointing that we’re curated and rationed in this way at all. Why not make everything available and searchable, by theme, the equivalent of a digital V&A? There will be rights issues, but surely that’s solvable and, with a few discreet adverts or an affordable subscription, it could be a useful income stream to a struggling institution in a struggling industry.

Until then, we’ll have occasional Musicals Nights on BBC Four with (probably) something to please everyone - but maybe not enough to please anyone. 

Musicals: The Greatest Show, recorded at the London Palladium during the Covid lockdowns, Wogan on Follies, Sondheim on Broadway: Follies – Four Days in New York and Sondheim at the BBC are available on the BBC iPlayer.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of BBC

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