“Perfection”
Georgina Brown - 17 May 2010
Transferring a show from a small venue such as the Menier Chocolate Factory to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London doesn’t always work. It’s like moving from a shoebox into a hatbox.
Happily, Cy Coleman’s raunchy, bittersweet Sweet Charity has risen to even greater dramatic heights and found new emotional depths.
Huge photographs of the Manhattan skyline summon Sixties New York, where Charity Hope Valentine makes a living in the rent-adancer business at the Fandango Ballroom. While most of the girls are dead behind the eyes, Tamzin Outhwaite’s Charity has clung onto her romanticism.
She’s chucked in the lake and robbed by her boyfriend Charlie, but she dries herself off and starts again, always too charitable, ever hopeful and invariably dumped on.
Outhwaite’s Charity is by far the cutest of the mini dressed girls. She dances for joy and sings with sweetness while the other hostesses are convincingly ‘caught on the flypaper of life’.
Led by the marvelously jaded Josefina Gabrielle and tough Tiffany Graves, they deliver the brassy Big Spender with bolshiness. In sharp contrast, the classy clientele at the Pompeii nightclub (the same girls playing different characters) strut their stuff with style.
The delicious Mark Umbers is just as busy: he plays all the men in Charity’s life, morphing from a matinee idol into the nerdy accountant Oscar, with whom Charity gets stuck in a lift then stranded on a big wheel.
It’s Charity’s purity that appeals to Oscar, and Outhwaite captures this to perfection. But if Charity finds I easy to put her past behind her, can Oscar do the same?
I guarantee Charity will show you a good time and bring a tear to your eye. ‘perfection’
