The Musical of Musicals: The Musical.

June (played by Hannah Ley), unable to pay her rent, asks her friend Willy (Will Collett) to help her in order to avoid the predations of her wicked landlord, Jitter (Jarrad West).  The additional advice of her idol Abby (Louiza Blomfield) may or may not help.

The five short musicals that constitute The Musical of Musicals follow this plot, punctuated by lively intermittent narration by co-director Duncan Driver.  Each is in the style of a well-established composer of musical theatre: Rodgers & Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerry Herman, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Kander & Ebb.  But these little musicals are less about how the plot’s four characters engage in this rent conflict than about how each musical style does.  With piano and keyboard accompaniment by the production’s masterful musical director, Nicholas Griffin, the characters’ almost continuous singing and dancing call to mind one famous musical number after another without actually duplicating their lyrics, melodies, or chords.  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre was especially well represented, with echoes of many of the best-known pieces from his best-known works sounding throughout the fourth mini-musical.  It’s cleverly done.  Adding to the constant amusement is the dialogue’s employment of much double entendre.

There’s a good deal of singing to memorise in this work, and many of the tunes are sung in four parts, and the cast does much of this while dancing energetically.  The cast’s performance of this challenging work was superb, not a note out of place — and the same must be said of the musical accompaniment, which required a talented pianist with an ear for a variety of styles.  And the cast followed its simple but effective choreography very smoothly.  A tight performance on a small stage in a cosy theatre, Everyman Theatre’s production of The Musical of Musicals offers strong reminders of just what it is in musicals that uniquely engages us, body and soul.

John P. Harvey

Image: [L–R] Hannah Ley, Nicholas Griffin, Will Collett, and Jarrad West, in The Musical of Musicals: The Musical.  Photographer: Michael Moore.