Sunday 8 November 2020

THEATRE REVIEW: From Here To Eternity: The Musical - The Shaftesbury Theatre, London


This weekend's offering on Universal Pictures's YouTube channel, 'The Shows Must Go On' was their live theatical recording from London's Shaftesbury Theatre of the Stuart Brayson / Tim Rice Musical, 'From Here To Eternity'.

To say I was underwhelmed and somewhat disappointed by this production would not be a lie. Two things I was expecting before watching the show were; sparkling and clever lyrics, and a trip down memory lane with regards to the story and characters that I remember well from the wonderful 1939 film of the same name starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. 

This Musical however takes its story (or should I say stories) from the novel by James Jones; as indeed did the film, but since the film was at a time when censorship was high, much of the book's themes and characters could not have been included. However, I am not familiar with the original novel and so when I watched a play that has several storylines all vying for prominence, and all of which denigrate my memory of the film, I became somewhat irked. However, one should be able to take the musical on its own merit - there will be thousands of audience members who have not seen the film - and so I must try and review this production from their perspective.

The story starts shortly before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and we see G-Company of The US Army posted there. The show's backdrop highlights the unfairness and mistreatment of army life at that time whilst the main stories are:

1) Private Prewitt (Robert Lonsdale) suffering under the commands of a corrupt Captain Holmes (Martin Marquez)
2) Prewitt's doomed romance with an exotic dancer Lorene (Siobhan Harrison).
3) The blossoming but illicit relationship between Sgt. Warden (Darius Campbell) and Captain Holmes's hard-nosed wife, Karen (Rebecca Thornhill).
4) Italian Private Maggio's (Ryan Sampson) comedic and unconventional misdemeanors with the homosexuals and military prison.

The Musical flits willy-nilly from one storyline to the other - Soap Opera style (and this isn't a Soap Opera) - so their developments are disjointed and we aren't really able to emote with or fully invest in any one single story. It also fails to allow for any real build up of tension. The individual performances are good and as convincing as the poor script allows them to be, but the whole is monodimensional and trite; the music is emotive and evocative but deliberatley so, with one 'touchy-feely' song after another, whilst Tim Rice's lyrics are far from his best; again trite and predictable. The whole feels much more like a work-in-progress than the finished article. 

The only real drama in the show comes 30 minutes from the end of this 2,5 hour epic, and whilst the denouement is good, the actual ending itself falls back on cliche losing us: it's weak and undramatic, and so a rousing close harmony anthem is required to mechanically wind-up our emotional strings, and that is exactly what happens.

Verdict: A poor man's Miss Saigon. 

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 7/11/20

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