Theatre
Barnum, King's Theatre, Glasgow
Alison Kerr
three stars
Barnum, the 1980 musical about the life and times of PT Barnum, the 19th century American showman and impresario, got off to a promising start - even before the curtain had gone up at the King's Theatre on Tuesday night. How? By bringing the circus performers into the audience and providing thrills and spills of the juggling and acrobatic variety.
Sadly, however, those thrills were short-lived - and even a genuinely exciting tightrope walk by the show's star, Brian Conley, at the end of the first act, couldn't stave off the waves of ambivalence that seemed to be sweeping the audience during the interval.
The problem is that Barnum is just not that good a musical. For starters, with the exception of the rousing Come Follow the Band, the songs are pretty much forgettable - and the lyrics, on Tuesday night anyway, were difficult to make out. One song - Black and White - was completely baffling in terms of what it was about and what it meant in terms of the "plot". Not that there is really a plot: Barnum is essentially episodic, with the loving yet antagonistic relationship between the pie-in-the-sky dreamer Barnum and his down-to-earth wife Chairy as the thread that runs through it.
What this production does have going for it is Brian Conley whose charisma and energy carry the show - he evoked Danny Kaye with his tongue-twisting (though hard to follow) rendition of the high-speed Museum Song on Tuesday, and brought the cynical showman to life with his WC Fields-like delivery and apparently spontaneous wisecracks. "Don't feel sorry for me - feel sorry for the drummer," he quipped as he prepared for his third attempt at the tightrope.
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