Jeremy Kingston
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For the first time in well over a century this astonishing survivor from the heyday of the Victorian music hall presents the sort of show it was built for. The original menu would have included sketches, acrobatics and variety turns, though the evening would have been dominated by songs - sentimental, cheeky, often teetering on the edge of the obscene, sometimes stepping boldly over it.
But after the death of its owner in 1880, this East End venue went into a decline and the last time an evening of music hall was performed here seems to have been exactly 120 years ago. Until now.
Andrew Barr's mostly enjoyable stab at reviving the genre takes its title from The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, a song he doesn't include, but there are something like 30 others that are a joy to hear again or, in many cases, for the first time, despite the misogyny that lurches to the surface. The framework of the show provides hints of the social history that might account for this, along with reasons for music hall's decline - the struggle against temperance laws, attempts to elevate the tone and the arrival of cinema.
Performances are patchy. Not all the singers have understood the acoustics of the place, complicated by having to sing across a forestage occupied by Roy Weskin's alliterating Chairman and his table of drinks. But the good patches are truly winning, and these include Mark Pearce's boisterous Champagne Charlie, Weskin's Man on the Flying Trapeze and Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay!, a song known from its fleeting appearance in Chekhov's Three Sisters.
Mike Sengelow, in his role as sorrowful child, invests Come Home, Father with almost embarrassing poignancy - and the Victorians must have felt this way too, for someone wrote the parody that follows it. The delightful Lulu Alexander closes the evening with Daisy, Daisy and during the last chorus the lights go down, the company leaves the stage and the audience continues singing in the dark. It is a magical ending.
Box office: 020-7702 2789
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