Can’t get tickets for the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet? Well, you should have no trouble snapping some up for this all-singing, all-dancing assault on the great Dane. Bob Carlton, the former artistic director of the Queen’s who stepped down last November after 17 years, famously scored a success with Return to the Forbidden Planet, a jukebox musical that combined The Tempest with Sixties pop and retro sci-fi.
In 1992 he also gave us From a Jack to a King, a reworking of Macbeth. Roll Over Beethoven, by Bob Eaton, employs the same — now pretty stale — formula, without the familiar hits; Eaton’s numbers are rock’n’roll pastiche, verging on rip-off. Oh, and there’s a bit of Beethoven chucked in for “the squares” — all of it, Ode to Joy included, furnished with glib, gag-laden lyrics and performed with more gusto than finesse by 11 actor-musicians.
Eaton’s show and Matt Devitt’s production are both so devoid of any real wit, heart or purpose that their one weak joke — the collision of high and popular culture — quickly wears thin. The action careers nonsensically from bohemian Soho to a fairground and a Butlins holiday camp in Clacton-on-Sea, and Eaton’s workaday dialogue is spliced with Shakespearean iambic pentameters.
It’s 1956, and Johnny Hamlet (a chiselled-cheekboned Cameron Jones) comes home from National Service to discover there’s “something rotten in the state of Denmark Street”. His classical music-loving dad is dead; mum Gertie is shaking a tail-feather with Uncle Claud at the Elsinore Ballroom. “My mind’s out of joint and that’s a fact/I’ll be a nutter by the second act”, laments Johnny, before going on to belt out a bastardised version of All Shook Up.
It’s unashamedly silly, which might matter less if it were more fun. Yet for all the cast’s energy, it is lacklustre and wearily routine — a lazy retread of Carlton’s outdated work that doesn’t cut it any more. Time to change the record.
Box office: 01708 44 3333, to Sept 12