Harry Hill and Steve Brown’s X Issue spoof I Can’t Sing! was hamstrung by having Simon Cowell as a producer. No such battle within the duo’s follow-up, Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera), which topics the messianic ex-PM to a chronic and pleasurable ribbing.
Charlie Baker brings the gormless, bopping vitality of Jack Black to the position of the previous MP for Sedgefield, who drifts into public life to fulfill his hero “Mick Jaggers”. Returning to No 10 deranged and saggy after pledging solidarity with George W Bush over Iraq, he resembles a person who has offered his soul or had essentially the most debauched weekend of his life. Or each.
Baker nearly holds collectively a manufacturing with the jamboree-bag messiness of a scholar revue or a kids’s social gathering (there may be balloon modelling courtesy of Peter Mandelson). The ten-strong solid, dressed uniformly in Blair’s go well with and pink tie, play everybody from Neil Kinnock to Diana, Princess of Wales (a standout flip from Madison Swan). Howard Samuels doubles up as puppet-masters Mandelson and Dick Cheney, and Holly Sumpton’s Cherie Blair comes on like Girl Macbeth crossed with The Liver Birds. In artwork as in life, Gordon Brown (Gary Trainor) will get a uncooked deal, calling for significant change whereas Blair – who bests him on the Granita dinner, staged right here as a wrestling match – rides the superstar cyclone.
The second act brings a double-whammy of numbers aiming for the bad-taste highs of The Producers or The E-book of Mormon. Kill the Infidels, sung by Osama bin Laden and his Actual Housewives spouses, is adopted by a Groucho Marx-style Saddam Hussein crooning I By no means Carried out Something Unsuitable. Too typically, although, the supply props up lyrics that lack a sure comedian gleam and precision.
Opening the present with Blair Methuselah-haired on his deathbed additionally whets the urge for food for hypothesis about his dotage, which sadly by no means transpires. Nonetheless, it’s becoming that he's wheeled in on a gurney below a sheet, smoke swirling round him. The impact may be very James Whale, neatly establishing the climactic suggestion that we voters are the Frankensteins who created this Prime Monster.
Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera) is on the Park theatre, London, till 9 July.
Post a Comment