Salad Days, Riverside Studios - review

This perky musical comedy is just the tonic for January gloom, says Fiona Mountford
P38 Salad Days
25 January 2013

The decorations are down and the gloom is up in these dreary early January days, which might make a trip to this perky musical comedy just the tonic. Salad Days (1954) treads an über-fine tightrope between being charmingly innocent and slapably twee, but some delightful songs and lovely frocks make me prepared to forgive quite a lot.

Jane (Katie Moore) and Timothy (Leo Miles) have graduated from Oxford and are expected, like all Fifties graduates, to have emerged as fully formed adults. Her family has a list of suitors and his one of high-achieving uncles who might offer him a career. Yet on a whim the friends marry and take possession of a magic piano — or “pee-arno”, as the frightfully well-enunciated pair put it — which makes everyone who hears it dance giddily. Their mothers are not amused.

It’s hard not to smile at the affectionate depiction of this long-gone (never-existed?) world, despite all the daftness that writers Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds have concocted. I’m afraid the piece did eventually lose me when it came to the flying saucer, though. Nevertheless a spritely cast give Bill Bankes-Jones’s production for opera company Tête à Tête bundles of energy and it’s intriguing to hear the actors sing without amplification. This practice, which encourages intelligent listening from the audience, is becoming a rarity in musicals.

The Riverside’s tricky, barn-like main space, the death of many a hopeful show, has been sensibly transformed into an agreeable park-like traverse. In one of several clever touches, we’re welcomed to our (degree ceremony) seats by a gaggle of pleasantly crotchety academics, who then high-kick their way through the opening number, accompanied by the accomplished onstage fourpiece band.

Moore is especially sweet-voiced and makes lovely work of I Sit in the Sun and The Time of My Life. If I were one of the uncles, I’d look at employing her instead of the slightly drippy Tim. Charlie Cameron proves impressive across a range of supporting roles. If it’s an endlessly good-natured, U-rated evening’s entertainment you’re after, this Salad won’t require any dressing.

Until March 2 (020 8237 1111, saladdaysthemusical.com)

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