A book, a film; a stage musical - what?
I was at the fourth preview night of The Third Man at the Menier.
Yes, it is that Third Man, drawn rather more from the film than the book. And yes, it is a musical.
Think slightly Sondheim, quite a lot Kurt Weill – not derivative as such, but belonging to an era.
Set on what is a thrust stage (but treated effectively as in the round) this, in the front row, was an immersive performance – and the opening scene, in a only just post-war Vienna was very effective in introducing poverty and menace as theme. We are as shocked as the newly arrived American – well hero isn’t quite the right word. And it has quite the most effective 'nightmare' sequence I have seen in along time.
The songs (with a couple or three of cabaret club exceptions) are there to take the action, or the meaning, forward. They aren’t going to win Novello awards (but they are very well performed) but neither are they not enjoyable.
The acting is uniformly strong, and Simon Bailey (Harry Lime) is dressed and coiffed to be a more than presentable Orson Welles look-alike, which works. He also doubles in the first half very effectively.
Overall this looks like an excellent idea which works – that there was no one standing at the end probably reflects the down-beat ending of what was effectively a film noire.
Two side notes – young actors don’t any longer know how to smoke cigarettes, which was a shame for this production, which called out for an effective ‘You’re Never Alone with a Strand moment, and rather telling – and the British Regimental Police unit in this production wore ‘Halberdier’ shoulder flashes – the regiment invented by Evelyn Waugh in his Sword of Honour Trilogy (Guy Crouchback was a Halberdier) – and more recently is used in the Total War: WARHAMMER game. Strange.
And it runs till 9th September. And transfers? Quite likely, I think.