Bonnie & Clyde at Garrick Theatre review: suffers from a criminal lack of focus

This Broadway musical is too glib to be serious and too po-faced to be a spoof
Darren Bell

Too glib to be serious and too po-faced to be a spoof, this Broadway musical about the Depression-era outlaw couple suffers from a criminal lack of focus. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killed around 13 people and became folk heroes during their early-1930s robbery spree. The show’s creators can’t decide if they are romantic rebels or vicious murderers. Hint: it’s the latter.

Apart from one jazzy, one bluesy and one superb gospel number, Frank Wildhorn’s score mostly comprises generic, string and slide-guitar driven soft rock. Ivan Menchell’s book is a by-the-numbers account of the couple’s romance and criminal notoriety, that hints the duo were failed by the American dream’s promise of prosperity, and by the bible-thumping Christianity of their native Texas. This is not the great American lyricist Don Black’s finest hour, either. Clyde’s hymn to his motoring skills (“when I drive… I’m alive”) is a case in point.

Nick Winston’s production, previously seen at the Arts Theatre, relies on projections of prison grilles and blood spatter, and on lights punching through bullet-holes in the proscenium, to augment its truncated motorcar centrepiece. It’s simple, stylish but overly shouty. It also shoots its bolt early by starting with a dramatic but fairly well-known spoiler, Bonnie and Clyde meeting their demise in a hail of 167 steel-jacketed bullets.

Darren Bell

Frances Mayli McCann’s Bonnie is vampy in a wrap dress, and dreams of being Clara Bow and/or a famous poet. Jordan Luke Gage’s rangy Clyde is a grinning, cocksure psychopath who idolises Billy the Kid. The couple give off a decent whiff of sexual chemistry and they have powerful voices, but both are occasionally flat. This Bonnie and Clyde decide pretty early on that excitement, fame and likely death beat poverty and obscurity, and they spend the next two hours reiterating it.

The exposition is clumsy. Bonnie is wooed by a bashful, aw-shucks sheriff’s deputy who babbles about buttermilk pie and warns her: “Stay away from THAT MAN.” Clyde’s nihilism is fuelled by dastardly prison guards who abet his rape by a cellmate. Clichés abound. Southern women bemoan their woes in accents as thick as hominy grits. Bonnie’s momma endlessly sweeps the porch: Clyde’s flees, sobbing, from what her son has become.

Moments of melodrama surface through a general air of levity. Bonnie and Clyde bicker about their billing while menacing a bank customer, and exchange firearms as if they were sex toys. A honking ballad between the two female leads – with Jodie Steele in fine voice as Clyde’s sister-in-law Blanche – is prefaced by arch sniping.

Throughout, I kept asking myself what the point was. There’s no urgency or great inspiration behind the music here, and no real attempt to ponder the personalities or the significance of Bonnie and Clyde. It’s just another bouncy, breezy, brainless musical trading on a bit of name-recognition.

Garrick Theatre, to Sat 20 May; bonnieandclydemusical.com

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