BWW Reviews: LANZA, The Kings Head Theatre, December 16 2010

Quiz question - which great American icon possessed a voice beloved of the masses (but disparaged by the critics); had the looks and charm to seduce women of all ages; struggled increasingly against addictions to legal drugs and eating; recorded a range of material that went from pop ballads to traditional religious songs; served as a GI, then starred in huge Hollywood hit movies (and a few turkeys); was too naive to prevent his management pushing him too hard; was constantly pursued by the tax authorities for money; and died tragically young, a victim of his own excesses, leaving an image frozen in time, never to bear the scars of middle age? Correct - Elvis Presley. But a generation earlier, Mario Lanza had had it all too before, succumbing to an unsustainable lifestyle and was dead, aged just 38, in 1959.

Andrew Bain, with the physique of an Italian boxer and enough alpha male body language to send the whiff of testosterone right up the audience's nostrils, brings Mario Lanza back to life in a show that tells the tale of Freddie Cocozza, a tough kid born in Philadelphia's Little Italy. Soon Freddie's father incessant playing of Enrico Caruso's records on the gramaphone instilled a love of opera in the kid and his mother was investing what little money she had in training a voice that everyone knew was a gift from God. Freddie was renamed Mario and getting heard and noticed. Along with the women and later a loving wife and four children, he was embracing the bottle with the passion that animated everything he did. After all, what good was a life that had it all... if it still wasn't enough?

Bain's monologue is regularly interrupted by his subject's greatest hits, standards all, sung up close and personal as you would expect at London's Little Opera House and with a knowing tinge of melancholy, most beautifully rendered in "Without a song". Throughout, Bain is accompanied on stage by Alison Luz playing various women and, with great skill, a baby grand piano. Director Anthony Shrubsall keeps the set bare and, through the approach of introducing his subject as a patient shuffling about in socks on a mobile drip, but slowly dressing him in the sharpest of Italian waistcoat, jacket and hat combos, emphasises the dissonance between Lanza's rising stardom and collapsing physical and mental health.

It's not a feelgood show, but Mario Lanza is a genuinely tragic figure. His largely forgotten story is told here with great skill and, crucially, great love and takes you back to youtube and the DVDs to rediscover The Voice that lives on half a century after the man left us. 

Lanza continues at The Kings Head Theatre until January 22.