Theatre review: A Face in the Crowd

Kwame Kwei-Armah's final directing job at the Young Vic is a new musical by Elvis Costello (music and lyrics) and Sarah Ruhl (book,) that adapts the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd. Judging by the Wikipedia summary of Elia Kazan's film, some liberties have been taken with the plot to make it even more topically relevant, but it certainly seems like this was a story that called out for revisiting in a year full of high-profile elections. Marcia Jeffries (Anoushka Lucas) is a small-town radio host whose show focuses on regular people whose voices don't usually get heard - like the inmates of the county jail, where she finds Lonesome Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo,) being held for drunk and disorderly behaviour. When he sings a song that charms both her and her listeners she invites him to become a regular contributor, and within weeks his hokey folk wisdom has made him the star of the show.

When agent Joey de Palma (Stavros Demetraki) signs him, he quickly turns local radio success into nationwide TV fame, and Lonesome starts to believe his own hype.

Kwei-Armah's production looks great - Anna Fleischle's set opens with quite an art deco look that gradually segues into something more Fifties as time moves on - and certainly has charm and strong performances, but I did feel a lot of the time like something was missing. In part it might be because the story wants us to care about a potential central romance that it never convices us of: Karimloo and Lucas are great individually as the monster and his creator (a Frankenstein allegory runs under a lot of the lyrics) but while I can easily believe they stick together for so long out of mutual self-interest, any romantic spark between them feels forced.

They both get alternative love interests: What does feel a completely plausible move for Lonesome is his judging a beauty pageant and promptly marrying (in a televised and highly unlikely to be legally binding ceremony) the winner Betty Lou (Emily Florence.) Meanwhile in the TV show writers' room is Marcia's old university friend Mel (Olly Dobson,) who's clearly pining for her but unlikely to ever outshine the other man in her life. I kept expecting this thread to twist into a nastier place as I'm so used to being suspicious of self-proclaimed nice guys, so it's odd to have this trope played so straight that Mel even has a song about nice guys finishing last.

And playing it too straight is, I think, my issue with the first act in general: As Lonesome's understanding of how to manipulate people through TV grows, he uses it to help a floundering presidential hopeful (Howard Gossington,) whose image, presentation style and even policies he starts to directly influence. It's clear where we're going with this so it's frustrating that Ruhl, Costello and Kwei-Armah hold back so long on really digging into the satirical side of the story: We're in a cheesy Fifites idyll whose nasty underbelly takes too long to show up, so it feels too much like the cheese is genuine.

So I much preferred the second act where the satire finally shows its teeth, Lonesome embracing and spreading far right populist politics, his megalomania growing to the point that he looks likely to edge out the senator and take the candidacy for himself. I think the show is also hampered a bit by being one of those musicals whose songs are entertaining enough, but always feel like they're interrupting and slowing the action down rather than serving it. The songs themselves are enjoyable, but while the title song is moving on first listen I wouldn't have been able to hum it on the way out (and it gets a lot of reprises.) Overall this is one of those shows that doesn't do anything catastrophically wrong, but still seems to be holding back enough of its potential that it never quite comes to life.

A Face in the Crowd by Elvis Costello and Sarah Ruhl, based on the film by Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg and the story by Budd Schulberg, is booking until the 9th of November at the Young Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.