Anyone fantasising that this 1950s, all-American musical will hymn the joys of bed-swopping, of slipping your way out of strait-laced pyjamas and enjoying whatever sex comes to hand, will be rudely awakened by the wholesome artiness of Simon Callow's daring new production. Discard your erotic reveries. The pyjamas in question are being made in a garment factory.
The game depends on the workers at Iowa's Sleep-Tite Pajama factory demanding a wage-rise almost as much as it does on a medium-warm love affair stoked up between Sid, the works supervisor, and Babe, a union leader. The Pajama Game may have delighted America in 1954, but the music by Richard Adler and Gerry Ross strikes me as elegantly bland in its varied pseudo-classical, jazzy, blues and early rock'n'roll score. There's not much sense of the militancy driving the work-force, led by Leslie Ash or of the sexual urges that keep breaking out among them.
Jean Luc Godard claimed The Pajama Game was "the first Left-wing operetta". But in Callow's production, the musical wears its political colours as if they were little more than cosmetic aids. The book by George Abbot and Richard Bissell misses excitement or wit. I came out singing the praises of the stage sets, canvases and sculptures by the avant garde abstract artist Frank Stella. I loved the pictures; shame about the show.
I am afraid, though, Stella's half-surreal designs tend to dominate the evening, if not steal it, and in strange ways. The Pajama factory is, after all. supposed to be a grimy sweatshop, with vice-chairman, works supervisor and time and motion man harrying the female workforce.
Stella's stylised settings allows for blown-up black and white drawings as backdrops. The pyjama-making machine room and offices are represented by great diagrammatic sketches . The machine-room clock resembles an art object. Here is an attractive fantasyland, not a factory. And the work's outing, a picnic scene with gorgeous Pointillist backdrop, and abstract outburst of colours, accentuates the fantasy mood. Choreographer David Bintley, Birmingham Royal Ballet's artistic director, contributes to this romanticising style.
He arranges the workers at the picnic and in the factory, in exuberant, athletic dancing displays. But there's insufficient sexual electricity. Callow, meanwhile, permits broad, revue-style acting. Graham Bickley's works supervisor is supposed to be a hunky sex symbol for whom Babe, the union girl, falls at one glance. But when it comes to hunks, Bickley is sliced far too thin for conviction and lacks the right stuff.
He's an easy, ardent singer while wooing Leslie Ash's cool, sexy Babe, and the duo achieve some jubilant, pulsating action in There Was Once A Man. But the attraction between them never grows any hotter than a fairly warm day in Shepherd's Bush. Callow does keep the big picture in clear focus, though performances are fuzzy. John Hegley's jealously disturbed time and motion man behaves rather like an automaton, a depersonalised grotesque; John Levitt's vice-chairman is a caricature of authority. Otherwise, Anita Dobson, wasted as a secretary, maintains a clear line in cackling cynicism, while Jenny Ann Topham brings a welcome touch of sexual scheming to a musical that looks far better than it sounds.
The Pajama Game
