If you're going to put on a show about putting on a show, you gotta get a gimmick, as a wise man not unconnected with the late Jack Rosenthal's autobiographical comedy once wrote. Put it another way: if the show/film/TV series depicted is compromised, you need something or someone off-centre to stand out from the crowd. In Barton Fink, it was a hotel corridor and what the Coen Brothers did with it; in BBC Two's Episodes, it's Tamsin Greig's low-key, ironic bewilderment. Here it takes the shape of a five-minute comic turn from Carrie Quinlan as Mancunian room service.
Let's not labour the point: this isn't quite star-is-born territory along the lines of Bryony Hannah's scene-stealing in the recently opened production of The Children's Hour, magnified by press disappointment with big-name filmstars on stage. Quinlan shows impeccable timing touched with skewed delivery and memorable diction; that's enough. She may get the best lines, too, on life and art, and I won't pre-empt her character's surprising apercus by giving them away. Nor is there anything less than accomplished from the three most experienced actors in the main ensemble of five with which to make unfavourable contrast. They savour the 1970s cheese-and-pineapple-on-sticks served up by Rosenthal in his dramatic retelling of an attempt to turn a hit play of his into a less-than-hit musical. It's just that their material isn't the stuff of which great comic performances are born.
I was lured to the show by the billing of Richard Schiff, rightly immortal for his deliciously subtle performance as saturnine White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler in America's best long-running series of all time - or so I'm obsessively inclined to think now that I've so belatedly discovered it - The West Wing. I might have been less keen had Tom Conti been held up as bait. Both, however, do what they have to perfectly well. Conti, having hammed it up as a Greek Lothario in Shirley Valentine, now brings his usual charming corn to bear on an Austrian Jewish émigré producer. No cliché is left unturned in the part - maybe because the real-life original, too, knew he was playing a type - but at least Conti keeps us laughing with a shrug or a phrase that pointedly dies on the lips of a man rather helplessly trying to keep the peace. Schiff does what he can with Bebe, a composer boasting 28 musicals to his credit, as he never tires of telling all - for which read Joo-lee as in Jule Styne, who back in the late 1970s transformed Rosenthal's Bar Mitzvah Boy to a chilly response from the critics. For some reason - attempted love interest with the director? Star role for wife Maureen Lipman, who took up her role in the 1981 premiere? - Rosenthal changed his own sex in the play; it's English wet blanket and successful author Liz who finds herself, along with lyricist Mike (a portrait of Don Black), dogged by rewrites and bemused by the Americans' shenanigans.
It starts well enough: the grand entrance of Bebe is theatrically postponed to introduce us to the other characters. Schiff is quietly terrifying in the way he first ignores his chief writer, refusing to acknowledge her presence and reserving eye contact for a deadly climax - possibly the most real thing in the play (it evoked for me a hideous encounter with a reasonably famous American conductor; not that I'd offended him, I was just less important than everyone else in the group). Then it's familiar show-building territory: from failure to triumph and back to failure again, with a manufactured Act II crisis and one interesting conflict between American let's-try-again and English let's-cut-our-losses-and-run, in both of which Cameron Blakely's energetic, precise director plays his part.
Keeping it all running are Tamara Harvey's zestful direction and the fairly elegant scene shifts of Paul Farnsworth's plausible 1970s designs, from Leger-decked New York penthouse to plush London hotel room dominated by a Giordano of Perseus and the Medusa's head via seedy Manchester hotel and backstage clutter. The one song in the show we get to hear, heard onstage-offstage as it were, is by Jason Carr, top-notch pastiche by a showman who knows his stuff.
The only sticking point rests with the oracles of truth. Natalie Walter's Liz and Josh Cohen's Mike get the most intractable gags in the play: the sexual ringing of the changes on the Twelve Days of Christmas with black lesbians, nymphomanic Lithuanians and rugby players just isn't funny, and they know it. But, despite their loveable mugs - and Walter has a nice line in wide-eyed incredulity - they fail to touch the naturalness which is supposed to offset the restless show-people's obsessions. I can well imagine that Lipman's talent for self-deprecating humour would have done it; but it proves hard work promoting the simplistic line that life, not art and certainly not musicals, is what it's all about. Try telling that to the authors of Showboat, La cage aux folles and - well, just about any Sondheim musical (his, by the way, was the gimmick-line, as lyricist for Styne's Gypsy). OK, so not every little comedy that hits the stage has to plumb the depths, but this pleasant and professionally handled piece of froth is the ultimate demonstration of vita longa, ars brevis. A sentiment with which not many in last night's audience, I suspect, would really agree.
- Smash! at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 8 May
Find the Jack Rosenthal BBC box set - including Bar Mitzvah Boy and Spend, Spend, Spend - on Amazon
