Instead of making money he's soon being hustled out of what little he already has, but eventually Ratso takes pity on him and invites Joe to stay at the condemned building where he's been squatting. They become a kind of family, but it's already doomed as Ratso instantly develops a severe case of Period Drama Cough as a New York winter sets in.
Although it's not the norm there's nothing wrong with turning a pretty bleak subject into a musical and there's been a few famous examples of them working, but this isn't one of them. I don't know if it's necessarily the subject matter or the way Lavery, White and director Nick Winston present it, but it misfires on pretty much all levels. The biggest problem is that from the very start the whole thing's flat and lifeless, to the point of being baffling: I genuinely couldn't tell if Joe punching a mirror in the opening scene, only for the sound effect of it breaking to come several seconds later, was a deliberately disorientating directorial choice, or the lead catastrophically mistiming his cue.
And in possibly the most extreme case of stage absence since Oliver Thornton in Rent Remixed, the lack of energy starts with the lead and infects everyone else. French's Texas drawl is a mumble that leaves almost all his spoken or sung lines inaudible, which certainly isn't a good start (the acoustics generally aren't great but some of the supporting cast do manage to rise above them.) It became apparent that I had no memory of ever seeing the film when it took me until almost the interval before I realised Joe was a dumb lunk we were meant to feel sorry for: His one-note, arrogant snarl in response to everything that happens, good or bad, gives off a very different vibe.
Vocally, the closing reprise of "Don't Give Up On Me Now" is such a good match to his shouty, gravelly singing voice, that I did wonder if the producers cast him entirely for that, without checking first if he could sing any of his other songs. But it's not like the material is giving him much to work with either; Joe presumably has some kind of tragic background, as we see moments when he's haunted by people shouting plaintively at him from behind a screen. But since we can't actually make out what they're saying we're none the wiser (I did pick out the word "Arkansas" a few times, which made me wonder if the cowboy from Texas was a false identity, but I've nothing else to go on.)
If even Tori Allen-Martin as a horny trophy wife can't raise a laugh you know the show's unsalvageable, although she does return in a different role in the second act to showcase easily the evening's most powerful vocals. In fact the second act is generally much better than the first, but then again so is dying of Period Drama Cough on a Greyhound bus.
While I'm so out of touch with modern pop music that I only know a handful of the songwriter's hits listed on the website, even through all the misfires you can tell Eg White's no yolk: A few of the songs are clearly strong, it's just hard to for them to have an impact when plonked randomly into a narrative, in performances that for the most part feel perfunctory. Maybe this material was never going to translate to musical theatre, but it's hard to know if that's what's at fault when the adaptation feels underpowered, underrehearsed and underwhelming in almost every respect.
Midnight Cowboy by Bryony Lavery and Francis 'Eg' White, based on the novel byJ ames Leo Herlihy, is booking until the 17th of May at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
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