Theatre
Thoroughly Modern Millie
The Playhouse, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
three stars
EVERYBODY is play-acting in Richard Norris and Dick Scanlan's stage musical of the 1967 comedy film set in the prohibition era. A Kansas City wannabe moves to the Big Apple to get herself a wealthy husband but ends up with much more than she bargained for. It's there in the way Joanne Clifton's Millie makes all her lifestyle choices from the pages of Vogue magazine. It's there too in the way her wannabe starlet gal pal Miss Dorothy affects even more airs and graces. Most of all it's there in the form of speak-easy chanteuse and society hostess Muzzy Van Hossmere, as the seemingly penniless Jimmy Smith falls for Millie in every way.
Featuring music by Jeanine Tesori with lyrics by Scanlan, it all makes for much archness in this new touring production, directed by Racky Plews more than a decade after the show won six Tony awards on Broadway. The songs reference everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to showtime schmaltz. The white slave trade plot that survives from the movie, and which features Michelle Collins as pseudo-oriental hotelier Mrs Meers, is like something straight out of old-school panto, though not always in a good way. As Millie enters New York's social whirl, there are even cameos for George Gershwin and Dorothy Parker.
Somewhere in all this is a frothy comment on female aspiration during cash-strapped times. Clifton makes for a blousy and hard-boiled but still charming Millie, while Graham MacDuff does a neat line in slapstick boozyness as Millie's boss Trevor Graydon in a show that is a lively, if not always memorable, experience. It transfers to the King's Theatre, Glasgow, next week.
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