My One And Only
Piccadilly Theatre Spring-Summer 2002

This musical has two attractive and talented stars, a score by George and Ira Gershwin (than which you cannot do much better) and three first-rate dance numbers. And yet its overall impression is of low energy and missed opportunity. How is that possible? The answer to that question must always lie with the director, and Loveday Ingram simply hasn't found the right tone and rhythm for this would-be light-hearted pastiche, which only intermittently comes alive.

My One and Only is actually a 1983 rewrite of the 1927 Gershwin musical Funny Face, with a new book by Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer hanging the original songs and others on the openly slim plot of a romance between a boyish aviator and an English Channel swimmer. Both were timely figures in 1927, but are treated here as quaint historical curiosities; and neither director nor actors seem able either to believe in them enough to play them with conviction or to find an appropriate sense of ironic distance from which to camp them up.

Tim Flavin dances skilfully and sings adequately but is unable to give the boy any charm or even the limited dramatic reality required by a musical. Janie Dee has oodles of charm and more than adequate singing and dancing, but seems oddly half-hearted and detached through most of the show, as if her mind were on her grocery shopping.

The supporting cast also seem under-directed. Hilton McRae plays the Russian villain as high camp and thus seems to be in a different play from everyone else, while Richard Lloyd King, as the hero's tutor in coolness, dances well but can make no sense out of his character. Jenny Galloway as a butch aeroplane mechanic and Richard Calkin as a hip clergyman each have good moments, the latter in one of the show's best dance numbers, "Kicking the Clouds Away."

The fact that the original Funny Face was a Fred and Adele Astaire vehicle is reflected in the fact that the revival's high points are the two dance numbers for the stars, one a quietly elegant falling-in-love-through-dance sequence worthy of mention in the same breath as Astaire and Rogers, the other an ebullient celebration of joyful passion danced splashily in a shallow pool of water. Craig Revel Horwood's choreography, which rises fully to the occasion here and in the climactic production number "Kicking the Clouds Away," is too often elsewhere merely serviceable or less, contributing to the overall sense of missed opportunities.

Another puzzle is why the 1983 adaptors (or the current producers), with one of the musical theatre's richest songbooks to plunder, didn't choose more wisely. The score includes "Swonderful," "Strike Up the Band" and "Nice Work If You Can Get It" (the last oddly directed as a lugubrious torch song), but is also bogged down with such undistinguished songs as "I Can't Be Bothered Now," "High Hat" and "In the Swim," when stronger alternatives could surely have been found.

So, there are three good dance numbers, a couple more Gershwin classics, and not much else to recommend this show which too often slogs along when it should float and barely floats when it should soar.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - My One and Only - Piccadilly 2002