How To Close A Show
FOND as our major producers are of raiding the stages of London and Broadway for “new” musicals, you have to reckon we won’t be seeing All Bob’s Women any time soon.
Originating in Milan, where it apparently ran successfully for nine months, the show was translated into some kind of English and produced at the Arts Theatre where it opened and closed almost as quickly as a Paddington frock shop.
The plot sounds suspiciously like Boeing Boeing (hunkaspunk juggling five girlfriends – wow) and the reviews were acid enough to make your eyes water.
Try this from Charles Spencer of the (London) Daily Telegraph: “It is now 12 hours since I emerged, traumatised and incredulous, from this dismal farce of a musical. I have been racking my brains trying to remember a worse night in the theatre, but nothing comes to mind … a comedy disaster area in Samuel Oatley's dire performance. His unlovable oaf of a cut-price Casanova raises nary a titter, even when concealing his private parts with a small frying pan … This is a show fit only for masochists and collectors of theatrical disasters.”
Roger Foss in What’sOnStage was a tiny bit more enthusiastic: “Some musicals are so bad, they ought to have an Asbo slapped on them, with a condition they aren’t allowed anywhere near a West End theatre until the author has done six months hard labour at a writer’s boot camp …” But he went on: “Musically, All Bob’s Women is middle-of-the-bed Europop. Comedically, it’s witless. Sexually, it’s pure theatrical vanilla …
”Fortunately for [Romy] Padovano (the only person ever to have written a musical about Eva Braun), the women in the cast … do everything in their power to find some real musical G-spots in his material, even if you suspect they are faking it beneath those naff purple sheets.”
Fiona Mountford in the Evening Standard wrote: “Sometimes, you have to worry about the sanity of theatre folk. How anyone thought it was a bright idea to stage this lamentable excuse for a musical for a two-month West End run and charge punters 29.50 pounds for the privilege is quite beyond me."
Mark Shenton in The Stage began his review: “Only one thing is consistent in the arrival of a biliously bad new Italian-written musical All Bob’s Women at the Arts Theatre - it maintains this venue’s currently unassailable reputation for hosting total duds …”
Even the suburban papers (traditionally kinder than metro publicationss here and overseas) could barely find a good word. In the Bromley Times Mark Campbell wrote: “Described as "a big hit" in Italy, All Bob's Women opened last week at the Arts Theatre, Great Newport Street. Whether it is still running by the time you read this is unlikely … Simply put, the script is dire.
And that script, says Campbell, isn’t a Boeing Boeing rip-off: “I take theft seriously, and here Padovano has stolen wholesale the plot of Alfie – and in so doing turned it into a flaccid semi-farce with neither the depth or the humour of the original (or even, come to that, the remake – it's that bad).”
Then he gets in a kind bit: “The performers, however, are clearly doing all they can to make the best of the material they've been given. No-one can accuse them of slacking – all six actors put their heart and soul into selling us this entirely unsellable product.”
But he sums up: “And though some might say the 70-minute running time is too short to do the show justice, I'd say it was about an hour too long.”
Ouch.
