Review: HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING, Southwark Playhouse

Or... How Not To Succeed In Show Business Despite Really Trying. Okay, that's a little glib and a little unfair because there's much to admire in Georgie Rankcom's bold new production, but there's just so much of everything that I guess something had to stick.

Frank Loesser's 1961 musical hit does not enjoy many revivals - and it's not hard to see why. Unlike his work with Abe Burrows for Guys And Dolls (dazzling audiences a mile or two away at the Bridge Theatre), the book pretty much sinks this show before it has so much as scrambled to its feet with its opener, "How To Succeed". We're just too far gone with self-help gurus in bookshops and online, Reginald Perrin and Don Draper (and, especially, Joan Harris and Peggy Olson) and, taking a deep breath a week or so after the Confederation of British Industry self-imploded, #MeToo. The joke, if ever there was one, in corporations letting down employees to the point of criminality (and worse) has long soured.

That gives a director some tough calls to make (though such questions are not unknown in the alchemical world of musical theatre). How can I balance off these great songs with lousy characters? How can I trade the exaggerations comedy demands with the rather bleak outcomes that inevitably ensue? How can I satirise what was, even 60 years ago, a satire?

Rankcom's solution is to meddle with gender rigidity, introduce some gender fluidity and dial everything up to 11 in the hope that this imposition of artifice can rescue (or excuse?) some pretty unpalatable ideas that are embedded so deep into the show that their excision isn't an option. Put like that, it's not difficult to understand why so few companies have taken on this formidable challenge.

It doesn't all work - in fact, as we entered the fourth hour beyond the show's billed start time, patience with the failing elements rather overpowered pleasure in those that delivered. Like many productions, a judicious cut of 20 minutes or so in the very lengthy first half would benefit those on either side of the fourth wall.

The cast deliver some splendid performances. Whether Gabrielle Friedman (J. Pierrepont Finch) is a little too much of an everyman as the devotee of the career guidance manual that gives the show its name is open to question, but I'd have liked to see a little more underlining of the ambitious window-washer's cunning that underpins his climb to the top.

That blankish slate does allow the collection of sociopaths she crosses on her journey to shine, just about staying the right side of cartoonish in their caricatures. The standout is Allie Daniel as the love interest, Miss Pilkington, the towering actress perfectly timing her comic lines while vesting her secretary, thwarted professionally and personally, with real pathos. Hers is the only full-rounded character and, therefore, the only one we really care about in a musical that is curiously shorn of emotional heft.

Tracie Bennett has some fun with her monstrously arbitrary boss man, J.B. Biggley (so that's where Trump found that strange adverb he favours) delivering the splendid old school tie song "Grand Old Ivy" with particular relish. Elliot Gooch goes full camp workmate from hell with Bud Frump, nephew of Biggley and, in his own dim and obvious way, a mirror of the protagonist in ruthlessly pulling on the levers of power to progress. Annie Aitken channels Christina Hendricks' look as the airheaded and pneumatic Hedy Larue, but she's been dealt a tough hand to play and the role never really lands.

Perhaps the less said the better about "Happy To Keep His Dinner Warm" (as unrescuable a song as the Bacharach/David groaner, "Wives And Lovers"), but "A Secretary Is Not A Toy", despite its clunking title, is relevant, since it still, somewhat obviously if incredibly, needs to be said. Best song of the lot is the somewhat tacked on 11 o'clock number, "Brotherhood Of Man" led wonderfully by the inexplicably underused Grace Kanyamibwa, who (in what I suspect is not an entirely intentional metatheatrical moment) plays a secretary whose talent for singing far outweighs everyone else in the company (in both senses of that word).

This is a production that sets its face towards a problematic show, packed with the good and the bad of musical theatre. It meets that challenge by imposing a 21st century sensibility on some very 20th century norms, rather than excavating the text for opportunities to subvert it. It's a partial success, but there's probably another, more subtle less garish, iteration of this show to come before we find a palatable home for the great songs and the not-so-great sentiments.

How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying at Southwark Playhouse until 17 June

Photo Credit: Pamela Raith