Take one Shakespeare comedy. Fillet out most of the poetry, throw in an eclectic set of songs by Shaina Taub, add a brightly-coloured Notting Hill streetscape (by Rob Jones), a thirty-member community chorus, a fabulous set of singing voices from the leading actors, a great big tap number for Malvolio, chicken-and-pepper canapés, confetti guns, and a white van, and you get… this. A triumphant, joyous, thoroughly entertaining show that puts a smile on your face before the lights go down and keeps it there until long after you’ve left the theatre.
I suppose you could justifiably criticise it for being Shakespeare-lite, but it’s so much fun that to do so would be churlish. Slimming the text down to an hour and forty minutes (no interval) and making room for Taub’s wonderful score means you’ll be disappointed if you came to hear Shakespeare’s poetry, but it’s not as if you’ll have to wait more than about ten minutes before somebody else does Twelfth Night, so get over it. The plot – I don’t need to run through it here, do I? – is entirely present and correct, but delivered at a run, the better to make room for those songs. There’s a shipwreck, mistaken identity, pranks, parallel love stories and all the rest of it, but not the undercurrent of grief that can underpin less sunny interpretations of the text. Purists might hyperventilate; everybody else will be too busy having a good time.
What’s surprising here is how well Kwame Kwei-Armah and Taub’s adaptation, which premiered at New York’s Public Theater in 2016 (and was produced there again this past summer) in a production that evoked New Orleans, adapts to London, where it arrives as Kwame Kwei-Armah’s first production as artistic director of the Young Vic. Taub’s score, which cleverly blends soul, R&B, pop, and golden-age-of-Broadway pastiche into a kind of theatrical tossed salad, sits very well indeed in present-day Notting Hill, and the area’s colourful streetscapes are beautifully recreated by Rob Jones on the Young Vic’s wide stage. It’s a joy to see the community chorus, whose members range from teenagers to people who – let’s put this delicately – have clearly had their bus pass for some time – kicking up their heels dancing Lizzi Gee’s artfully artless choreography and obviously having the time of their lives, and you can’t see the join between the ensemble and the (Equity) principal cast.
That’s high praise, because the principal performances are faultless. Gabrielle Brooks is a fine, feisty Viola. Natalie Dew brings a lovely sweetness to Olivia, and her duet with Brooks is splendidly sung. Gerard Carey’s Malvolio is a comic tour-de-force wrapped in yellow lycra. Melissa Allen’s Feste combines a thrilling voice with drop-dead timing. Everybody is funny, the singing is gorgeous, the cast and chorus obviously love both each other and the material, and by the time the various revelations and weddings roll around in the final scene you’ll be experiencing as pure a theatrical high as you’ll get this year.
Simply, this show works. You lose, as I said, a lot of Shakespeare’s poetry, but it’s a fair exchange: this is a glorious, joyful celebration of theatre, of music, of diversity, of London. As an opening production from Kwame Kwei-Armah, it’s quite a calling card. Set against the increasingly nasty divisiveness in this country’s political discourse, particularly surrounding multiculturalism, it’s also a very definite (and very welcome) statement: a celebration of what is great about modern Britain at a time when we see far too many reminders of what isn’t, in which Kwei-Armah and his cast remind us that diversity and inclusiveness are strengths without ever delivering a lecture. The message is there if you look for it, but nobody ever preaches – which is as it should be when the message is something that really should go without saying.
Saving the word, one apostrophe at a time. 