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A
Face In The Crowd
Young
Vic Theatre Autumn 2024
Given the rise of populism across the world, the production of a musical version of the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd would seem timely.
With music and lyrics by Elvis Costello, the playwright Sarah Ruhl creates a light, generally cosy story of the drifter Lonesome Rhodes, taking him from an early scene in which he is found sleeping off a drunken night in a police cell by local American radio producer Marcia Jeffries, to his eventual rise to the role of national television star being courted by a presidential candidate.
His great talent is a quick-talking, folksy, down-to-earth cheerfulness, peppered with stories of ordinary people. One of his first radio chats wins an audience of women by his reminder to the audience that we too often neglect the work women do in the home.
Mischievously, Lonesome, played impressively by Ramin Karimloo, gets all the local kids to take a dip in the local sheriff’s swimming pool on a hot day,
Soon he is interested in dating Marcia (Anoushka Lucas), but before anything significant can happen, he impulsively marries the seventeen-year-old Betty Lou (Emily Florence).
The music is generally pleasant, occasionally evoking a mood of fun or sadness, with the title song having a catchy uplifting quality. However, the songs don’t progress the plot or tell us much about the characters or the politics of the play. They also cramp the opportunity to develop the dialogue.
As a consequence, the story is politically slighter than the 1957 film in the early sections, and in contrast the later sections suddenly rush in with characters worrying that Lonesome is going to mention immigration or the abolition of social security.
Oddly, at a time when the behaviour of powerful men is under greater scrutiny than in 1957, this production paints a kinder picture of the philandering Lonesome than the film and tilts Marcia’s understandable reaction to that behaviour in the film into a form of jealous rage in the musical.
There is no question that this final show at the Young Vic directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah is entertaining and comfortable to watch, even over the nearly one-hundred and fifty-minute running time, but it could have been so much better.
Keith
McKenna
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Review of A Face In The Crowd - Young Vic Theatre 2024