Review: SEIZE THE CHEESE!, New Wimbledon Theatre Studio

Once a year, News at Ten’s “And finally…” segment would feature Trevor McDonald smiling indulgently as he introduced the West Country’s Cheese Rolling competition, VT showing a variety of limbs breaking and concussions induced. Us cosmopolitan types poohed-poohed the peasants and their quaint ways and speculated on how much scrumpy had been taken prior to the cartwheeling downhill - we shouldn’t, but we did, and this was clearly the intention.(Clive James made a whole series of shows with exactly the same premise).

That late May injury-fest forms the inspiration for Mike Stocks’ and Patrick Steed’s new musical, Seize The Cheese! (any metaphors linking launching a new musical with throwing oneself down a 200 yard, 1 in 2 slope must be strongly resisted). What we get is a very mixed bag of a show, that ascends to genuinely moving moments as quickly as it descends into a structural blancmange.

We open on The Keeper Of The Cheese, a self-confessed old hippy who is in touch with the forest spirits, from whom she gains supernatural powers. Cathy McManamon is our Keeper / narrator, something of an Oberon figure in her sowing of chaos tinged with an element of benign matriarchy.

Soon we’re introduced to the ‘cheese-seizers’ themselves, who become both actors in their own stories and a chorus for them. And there hangs one of the problems for the show. There are lots of characters, who each seem to get an ‘I Want’ song - the couple who can’t conceive, the guy frightened of his own shadow, the bullied teenage daughter, the madcap inventor, the couple edging out of the Friend Zone. They’re all dead set on seizing the cheese as a symbol of their seizing of their destinies. The trouble is that no sooner are we invested in their stories, having enjoyed their showcase song, than they’re off and another personal trauma is placed before us. The couple longing for a child were off-stage for over an hour - how can our commitment to their cause be maintained?

The songs are pleasing without any being truly memorable. Because every character wants something, then has a problem to overcome in order to get it, they are tonally too similar to differentiate easily - rather like a cheeseboard of supermarket Double Gloucesters. The singing is variable, but Rosie Zeidler has a wonderful voice, one that could comfortably reach the back row of the upper circle in the big theatre next door.

Another standout is Travis Wood who plays the sought-after cheese itself. Not only does he sing, going full Frank Sinatra at times, but he also injects some much-needed comedy into the show, his acerbic asides and transgressive trumping of the Keeper, lightening what can feel like a heavyweight burden of relentless individual problems being faced up.

What the show misses is a coherent narrative to knit the individuals’ stories together, so it works better as a song cycle than as a musical at the moment. The closest we get to a unifying thread is the handing over of the Office of Keeper which, like that of the Dalai Lama, is done via a mystical identification of a younger replacement who, like each Keeper before them, forgets their name. But that storyline is only introduced late in the piece and feels like a missed opportunity.

Rather like the chasers of the cheese, the show is overly-ambitious but, also as in the case of those madcap marauders, one can also admire its chutzpah in getting a new musical on its feet, something as tricky to do in 2023 as it is when running down that hill near Gloucester every Whit Bank Holiday chasing after the big round calorific prize.  

Seize The Cheese! is at New Wimbledon Theatre Studio until 11 November

Photo Credits: New Wimbledon Theatre

              

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