This weekend's offering from 'The Shows Must Go On' channel on Youtube, saw the streaming of a musical of which I knew nothing: Ruthless! This was a recording of the 2018 production at The Arts Theatre in London.
Ruthless! is basically a chamber musical, using only two static sets (one for each act), and a cast of only 6, and so perhaps a West End theatre (although the Arts Theatre is not very large) was perhaps not the right choice of venue. Something like this would have worked better in a Fringe Theatre setting.
Act 1, set firmly in the 1950s, sees 8 year old Tina, (Anya Evans), a talented and ambitious triple-threat audition for the school production, knowing that she is by far the best person for the role of Pippi, but instead is cast as the dog! A little relunctantly the school agrees to allow her to be the understudy, and when Tina sees her chance to steal the role, she goes ahead and takes it! Act 2, now we are in the swinging 60s!, sees Tina's mother being lauded as a star, and this, as well as further familial revelations, get in the way of Tina's dream... just excatly how ruthless can she be?!
Billed as a roaring comedy, satirising many other well known musicals along the way, I found the humour both trite and predictable, and genuinely unfunny. The musical numbers are unmemorable, and the parodies not marked or clear enough to be able to laugh at them for their being a parody; with the exception of the many 'Gypsy' references and a little of 'Annie'.
There were also two things within this show which I was really struggling with. First, the six cast members are all, ostensibly, female. I could see no reason at all why all six shouldn't have been female. Why was Sylvia St Croix played by a female impersonator? (Jason Gardiner). It added nothing, it was not, as far as I could tell, parodying any other Musical, and so couldn't see the reasoning behind this. And it isn't as though there is a shortage of male roles available in the theatre generally...!
The second thing which didn't ring true for me was Tina. In Act 1 she is 8 years old. In Act 2 she is 12. An adult can easily play a four year age difference without any make-up or physical change.. but those four years in a child make a huge difference, and to see her at 12 looking, talking, behaving, being, exactly the same as she was at 8 was highly unrealistic.
There is a little nod towards 'Chicago', but the denouement is just very very silly, and not in a good or funny way. But I did like the lush Gerschwin-esque final chords of the show.
I tried to like this show, I really did; but it simply isn't possible to invest energy and time in a show which is filled with monodimensional and irritating egotists which are impossible to relate to, or even laugh at, on any level.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 12/12/20
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