Victorian globetrotters

10 April 2012

It may look rough around the edges, like an over-stuffed back-packer's rucksack, but no one can deny the camp delights of Phil Willmott's latest Christmas show. Freely adapted from Jules Verne's novel about an explorer who takes a wager to prove the world can be traversed in 80 days, Willmott has plotted an itinerary of fun and games to rival any tour operator. Not only that, the songs he wrote himself stand out in a score which includes popular numbers from the show's Victorian setting.

Willmott's story cannibalises all the classic stereotypes from the old matinee movies. Especially enjoyable is the pitching of the immovable object of the repressed English gent against the irresistible force of a high-maintenance, exotic girly.

Bill Ward's stiffly erect Phileas Fogg spends his time immersed in Brad-shaw's Universal Timetable. He studiously ignores Rae Baker as the demure, but ball-busting daughter of the Maharaja. Willmott then pens himself a cameo as an Etonian villain trying to stymie Fogg. But, best of all is Timothy Mitchell as Fogg's resourceful, excitable, Franglais-fluent valet, Passepartout.

Like the story, Annemarie Lewis Thomas's music skips along with all the rapidity of Fogg's fictional journey. Fogg is dispatched with the charming overture, 80 Days, and there's a cancan of a send-off for Passepartout in the Parisian Moulin Rose. However, the funniest song is Life Here in the Wilderness, which satirises the Mormon cult of polygamy. But Willmott also tops the holiday romance with a statutory weepy for the end - How Was I To Know - sweetly sung by Rae Baker.

On Hansjörg Schmidt's versatile design of bare boards, scaffolding and battered suitcases, Andri Korniotis fields a Dickensian range of Victorian costumes. A special mention, too, has to go to Mervyn Millar's puppet design of a life-size elephant, which roots and toots like the real thing.

Accents wobble as the cast go globe-trotting and both band and cast struggle to keep time. The standard of singing and dancing is also as diverse as a Eurovision Song Contest, but Jack Gunn's energetic choreography does well to keep everyone from injury. Not, therefore, the slickest show this side of the Khyber Pass, but its quality is best measured by the breadth of its audience's beams.

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