From tonights Evening Standard
Backstage at the Novello Theatre, a week into preview performances, the cast and creators of Cameron Mackintosh's new £2.5?million musical comedy Betty Blue Eyes are starting to give off an air of quiet optimism.
Audiences are responsive and all the songs and jokes are in the right place. Most importantly, the titular animatronic pig is going down a storm. The reliance on a mechanical porker is just one of the factors that made this musical riskier than most.
True, the show has lots of things going for it.
It's adapted from Alan Bennett's much-loved film comedy of rashers and rationing, A Private Function, in which Michael Palin and Maggie Smith, as meek chiropodist Gilbert and his social-climbing wife, Joyce, kidnap a black-market pig reared for a civic banquet celebrating Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Prince Philip.
It's a "happy, unhappy coincidence", according to director Richard Eyre, that the musical, five years in gestation, should open as a new royal wedding lightens a new era of bleak austerity. Or as Mackintosh himself puts it: "God is the best producer."
The casting covers several bases. Ex-Corrie primetime favourite Sarah Lancashire and the League of Gentlemen's Reece Shearsmith take the leads. Adrian Scarborough, recent winner of an Olivier award for his scene-stealing turn in Rattigan's After the Dance at the National Theatre, plays the dastardly meat inspector, Wormwold.
But these are not big names compared with, say, Michael Crawford, currently wowing the crowds in the Wizard of Oz at the Palladium for Mackintosh's old cohort and competitor Andrew Lloyd Webber. Betty cost precisely half the Wizard of Oz's £5?million budget and the show has what Eyre calls a "manageable" ensemble of 20 (most musicals have 30) and a 10-strong band.
Betty's composers George Stiles and Anthony Drewe are known to aficionados rather than the average coach-party punter. The American scriptwriters, Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, aren't known to British audiences at all.
And the story, with its specific and parochial place, time and accents, is arguably less likely to appeal to international audiences than previous Mackintosh blockbusters like Phantom, Les Mis or Miss Saigon - a show set in post-war Yorkshire, in which the leading lady is set for slaughter, is not going to be an easy sell.
"There's a lot of queuing and misery," says Shearsmith, adding hurriedly, "although it's wittily done and you come out beaming."
Scarborough agrees. "If people come expecting Les Misérables," he says, "they're not going to get it."
Indeed they are not. Having seen the show I can tell you it's warm, wry and more politically and emotionally detailed - even, dare one say it, wittier - than Bennett's original. But I'm at a loss to explain why it works as a musical. At least I'm in good company. Lipman and Cowen came up with the idea after seeing the film late at night on TV while working on a Canadian series (when, according to Lipman, "the pig sang to me").
Bennett gave his blessing and Stiles and Drewe signed on, intrigued even if they weren't quite sure why. They mentioned the project to their old friend Mackintosh. The producer hadn't worked on an original musical since The Witches of Eastwick in 2000, and was quite busy enough with revivals. But he too had an instinctive, enthusiastic response to the idea that he can't quite explain.
"Without Betty, I've got 25 shows round the world, my [seven London] theatres to run, and I'm producing a movie of Les Mis," he says. "Also, I'm 64, so I'd quite like to enjoy my life. But when they played me the music and showed me the script I made a 20-second calculation. Would I ever forgive myself if I let this go? The answer was no. I always need to fall in love with a story first, the characters second, and the music third, and that was the case with Betty."
He hopes audiences will do the same: "Please, God, the critics like it, but word of mouth will be the key."
Richard Eyre, who worked with Mackintosh, Stiles and Drewe on a production of Mary Poppins which is still playing around the world, and who mounted two productions of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre during his decade in charge there, is clearer on what drew him to Betty.
"I love Alan Bennett, and I find the period alluring," he says. "I was born at the end of the war and like many of my generation I'm fascinated by that 1945 promise of a refashioned world. I also liked the adaptation enormously."
Guys and Dolls, Eyre says, bears comparison with this new work. "Like the best musicals, Betty Blue Eyes is character-driven. It features a small community divided among itself - the town council and the people. It has a quirky love story at its centre, between Gilbert and Joyce.
And like all the best musicals, it has a subsidiary love story, which is about the love some people have for the pig, Betty."
Everyone involved pays tribute to the original film and its stars. Shearsmith is not "doing Palin" but says he watched A Private Function again during rehearsals to study the beautifully understated moment when Gilbert decides to kidnap Betty. Lancashire says she loved the 1984 film, and Maggie Smith's "brittle" performance, so much she bought the screenplay after seeing it. "But the show is absolutely its own thing," says Eyre.
"It doesn't require you to know the film, or invoke it to give itself authority. It has its own integrity."
Everyone, from Mackintosh down, insists that Betty Blue Eyes is a comedy with music in it, rather than a musical with comedy in it. None of the actors is known primarily as a song-and-dance performer and, Shearsmith says: "We creep almost insidiously into the songs." The story is to the fore. The relationship between Joyce and Gilbert has been given more depth, with flashbacks explaining how they met and a greater sense of closure for them at the end. The antipathy between Gilbert and Joyce's mother is also clarified.
The songs, meanwhile, liberate the characters from the drab post-war world. Scarborough and Lancashire get ecstatic musical numbers expressing their characters' inner lives and aspirations. Shearsmith's Gilbert is less OTT since he is, as Eyre puts it, "the perfect Bennett hero: droll, dogged, stoical, and inherently subversive just by being decent and believing people should behave well". But even he gets to sing, at length and with ardour, about his love for a pig.
Ah yes, the pig. Mackintosh pondered using a real one, but Eyre was adamantly opposed, having worked with a real pig on a sketch for The Secret Policeman's Ball with the anarchic Ken Campbell.
"It squealed from the moment it got in the theatre, shat everywhere and terrified the audience," says Eyre (he means the pig, not Campbell). While casting a production of Mary Poppins in Melbourne, he and Mackintosh visited an animatronic workshop, and decided their pig would be mechanical.
It seems to have been the right decision. "When she comes on, it doesn't matter what the rest of us are doing," says Shearsmith. Scarborough concurs: "Nobody looks at anything else."
Mackintosh and Eyre both smirk like abashed lovers whenever they speak of their porcine leading lady.
"My hope is that come opening night London falls in love with Betty," says Mackintosh. "But I am a realist about this. I never expected a big advance [at the box office]. It will take two to three weeks for word to get round about a show people don't know. The show doesn't have a big star, or famous authors, apart from Alan. But what I do believe is, this is exactly the show we all wanted to do. If the public don't take it to heart, it won't be because we haven't got it right."
Betty Blue Eyes is previewing now at the Novello Theatre (0844 482 5170; bettyblueeyesthemusical.com)
Updated On: 3/29/11 at 01:22 PM
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