This Family has gusto

10 April 2012

Ignorance is rarely bliss. So I, being scarcely acquainted with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operettas, believe it's folly for novices to hope for illumination or true pleasure from John Doyle's inventive, iconoclastic jazzed-up spoof of The Gondoliers, first admired in April at Newbury's Watermill Theatre . You cannot appreciate a spoof when ignorant of what's being spoofed or why. G and S purists - who tend to be true-blue reactionaries - will be appalled by Doyle's free rewriting and modernising of Gilbert's libretto about two Venetian gondoliers who discover one of them is heir to a Spanish island. Worse, Sullivan's sedate score has been adapted and transformed by Sarah Travis, into free-style jazz, with exuberant Latin rhythms and a sense of swing. The idea is to convert G and S's Victorian operetta into a broad Mafia musical farce. Two waiters from the Gondola Restaurant in Little Venice, Maida Vale realise one of them is destined by birth to join the Family as the next Mr Big. I found Doyle's abstruse, coarse-grained plot, which whisks the action from Maida Vale to real Venice and little Italy, Chicago, irritatingly hard to follow. Yet you would have to be thick - and thick-eared - not to appreciate the remarkable versatility, the glaring gifts and gusto of the cast of eight, most of whom play more than one musical instrument on stage.

There's exuberant song and dance, guying of Mafia guys in sinister black, with Karen Mann deliciously gross as a Godmomma on a mobile phone. On a set of chessboard black and white squares, the moves come thick and fast. Christopher Dickins, Eddie Burton, Mark Crossland and Elizabeth Marsh are just brilliant as the main attractions in Doyle's slick production.

Gondoliers

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