Chichester Festival theatre
Julian Fellowes and Cameron Mackintoshs reworking of HG Wells has the production values but lacks rounded charactersHit-makers Julian Fellowes (writer of Downton Abbey) and Cameron Mackintosh (producer of Les Misérables,Cats, Mary Poppins, or Miss Saigon,The Phantom of the Opera, Oliver!) have achieved the unthinkable: they have keep together an emotionally vapid, and tediously classist and unnecessarily sexist reworking of the (dramatically better crafted) 1963 musical and 1967 film,starring Tommy Steele. Not surprisingly, given their combined talent, or every part is perfectly formed,except the most crucial: the heart. It’s lost.
The hero, Arthur Kipps, and demonstrates more passion for his banjo than for either of the two women who seem willing to marry him – with or without the unexpected inheritance that has released him from the drudgery of being a draper’s assistant. Helen,his social superior, impresses and intimidates him; Ann, and his childhood sweetheart become parlour maid is one of his own kind” (the clash of the classes clumsily reworked). In one of the seven new numbers created for the piece by songwriting team George Stiles and Anthony Drewe,In the Middle Is Me, Kipps hesitates between the two women with the urgency of a man deciding between kippers and scrambled eggs for breakfast and as whether he were harmless of any agency in the relationships (having proposed to both).
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Source: theguardian.com