Can a show be so naff it comes out the other end and becomes cool? Actually the answer is no, cool is in no way on the table, but if you're prepared for enough cheese to floor Wallace
and Gromit, you could be in for an entertaining night. It seems
Finian's Rainbow is revived fairly regularly in America, where tolerance to high levels of begorrah and bejaysus are higher than here - the Union's is the first professional London production for 50 years. And it's actually not surprising, because I imagine this ridiculous bit of Irish-American whimsy from songwriter Burton Lane and writers E.Y Harburg and Fred Saidy is pretty hard to pull off for British audiences. But that's what Phil Willmott has done, funnily enough by failing to do what he'd intended to: The rights-holders had considered letting him do a rewrite for modern audiences, but changed their minds.
