Tuesday March 19, 2024
REVIEWING THE SITUATION
Review

REVIEWING THE SITUATION

February 7 2016

REVIEWING THE SITUATION, Hayes Theatre, 4-7 February 2016. 

Finally catching up with Phil Scott in the return season of his one-man bio-show, co-written and directed by Terence O’Connell means discovering everything that’s already been said about it is true: it’s really good! (With an exclamation mark.)

It tells the story of nice Jewish boy Lionel Begleiter whose natural and unschooled talent for songwriting took him from grotty East End Stepney, to a 27-room mansion in Chelsea. And finally west to Acton and a poky flat above a laundrette where the heat rising from the dryers kept the ailing and ageing Lionel Bart warm in winter and sweltering in summer. He saw the funny side of all that.

For Scott, the key to the story was Cameron Mackintosh saying Bart was the least bitter man he’d ever met. And as the story unfolds over 70 song-filled minutes, it becomes clear that if Bart had been that way inclined, there were enough hard knocks along the way (many merrily self inflicted) to make him very sour indeed. 

Sharing the stage with a grand piano and a large bottle of Tanqueray, Scott effortlessly adopts the distinctive slurring, glottal-stop voice so typical of many East End Jews. Bart died in 1999 at the age of 68, by which time his glory days were long gone. Yet few would fail to recognise the opening bars of a half dozen songs from his greatest work, Oliver!

Most fascinating, in the tightly scripted, witty narrative, are the anecdotes about the music and songs – how he came up with the rhymes, the deceptively simple structures of the tunes (he never wrote nor read music), and the stories behind them. For instance, Nancy’s exquisite love song to Bill SykesAs Long As He Needs Me – becomes something else entirely when Bart is revealed as a closet gay for most of his life. 

REVIEWING THE SITUATION

Oliver! (he loved an exclamation mark) was his triumph and eventually his downfall: he never really matched it and the “easy come easy go” money it brought slipped through his fingers with the greatest of ease.

Nevertheless, Bart’s life was so much more than just the tale of Charles Dickens’s orphan boy. He wrote No.1 pop hits (Cliff Richard’s first ever); he wrote novelty numbers (the inane smash hit Little White Bull for Tommy Steele and the movie Tommy the Toreador). He was fair weather friends with as many stars as there ever were in MGM heaven. Only Barbara Windsor was there in the bad times.

Phil Scott is a master showman, the piano keyboard is an extension of his hands and he is as charming, authentic and appealing as an East End wide boy should be in reminding us of the one that – sort of – got away. 

 

 

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