Theatre review: Sweet Charity

I started this blog in 2012, which coincided with when Josie Rourke took over the Donald and Margot Warehouse; barring the odd performance that got cancelled, that means I’ve now covered her entire run as Artistic Director as we get to her grand finale. Having had a hit with City of Angels, Rourke returns to Cy Coleman, who provides the music (with book by Neil Simon and lyrics by Dorothy Fields) for Sweet Charity. Anne-Marie Duff plays the titular Charity Hope Valentine, a New York “taxi dancer” – a barely-veiled front for prostitution, except unlike most of the other women Charity doesn’t do anything more than advertised. Nor has she really made the connection between this and the fact that she’s not managed to make any money in her eight years on the job – her tragedy is that she’s just not very bright, which combined with a romantic sensibility that makes her believe in a Hollywood ending means she invariably trusts the wrong men.

This is a quintessentially 1960s musical which Rourke’s production absolutely plays up, Robert Jones’ silver set evoking Andy Warhol’s factory (and the ensemble sometimes dressing up as multiple Warhols.)

It means the production deals with Sweet Charity’s oddness by hanging a lantern on it: Charity ends a song with a spirited “olé!” despite there having been nothing Latin about it until that point; much of the first act is about her chance meeting with a movie star (Martin Marquez) which provides much comedy and a few good character points but has no bearing whatsoever on anything that happens afterwards; and the ending relies on the love interest suddenly announcing that a throwaway comment he made several scenes earlier was actually the entire key to his personality and invalidates everything we know about him so far. So embracing the more drug-influenced aspects of the Sixties in the aesthetic makes the weirdness easier to shrug off – I was pretty quickly drawn into the show, and having been worried that I was too tired to enjoy it properly it soon had me feeling livelier.

Duff is a brittle figure as Charity; she’s not a natural singer but it doesn’t matter so much when the character’s so clearly damaged under all the glitz. Besides, Sweet Charity is unusual in that the title character doesn’t feature much in the most famous numbers: “"If My Friends Could See Me Now" is the best-known one she actually takes the lead on, but “Big Spender” is an ensemble number for the other taxi dancers, and Nickie (Lizzy Connolly) and Helene (Debbie Kurup) do the heavy lifting on "There's Gotta Be Something Better Than This." As for Act 2 opener "The Rhythm Of Life," Rourke celebrates her final show by getting a rotating cast of big names to play cult leader Daddy Brubeck: Adrian Lester is currently doing the honours, and names already announced for later in the run include Le Gateau Chocolat, Beverley Knight and Clive Rowe.

Arthur Darvill is a more seasoned musical theatre lead, and his Oscar Lindquist is an endearingly nebbish love interest, even if his eventual abrupt heel turn is hard to make feel natural. But then this is a musical with a sting in its tail, and provides a fitting send-off for Rourke: Like many Artistic Directors’ farewells it’s a largely celebratory evening, and she gives Sweet Charity a mix of inventive fun and Brechtian staging (for instance the various ways the cast create the scene captions) that makes it feel a particularly Donmar take. But it’s also a show that’s there to pull the rug out from under you, which also feels suitably on-brand.

Sweet Charity by Cy Coleman, Neil Simon and Dorothy Fields is booking until the 8th of June at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.