MOST American musicals are exercises in wish-fulfilment, and none more so than Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I mean, here are near-feral backwoodsmen whose idea of eating supper is to leap on to a timber table and gobble.
Enter the woman whom the eldest brother has improbably married and lo, she instantly transforms his six siblings into Nureyevs. They remove the beards, moustaches and frizzy wigs that have made them look like badly made-up silent-movie villains and, clean-shaven and inexplicably dressed in Cossack costumes, they twirl round their DIY homestead as if auditioning for the Kirov. Did Snow White achieve half as much with her seven dwarfs?
It’s been said that the musical’s sexual politics lie somewhere between the Bronze and Iron Ages, but at least the librettists, Lawrence Kasha and David S. Landay, suggested that women were born to civilise as well as to cook, sew and clean. That was something for 1954, when the original film appeared, with Howard Keel as the eldest brother, Adam, and Jane Powell as Milly, the spunky gal he woos like Petruchio in The Shrew and weds even faster. Whether it helps to justify the show’s stage revival now is another matter.
As frontier musicals go, this certainly isn’t Oklahoma! and isn’t quite Annie Get Your Gun, either. But it’s good-natured, boasts the jaunty and pretty score that won an Oscar. At the Haymarket it offers plenty of energetic, athletic ballet. The axe-waving, log-chopping number is stronger in the film, as is the square dance that escalates into a bust-up when Adam’s brothers go looking for wives themselves; but then the Haymarket stage isn’t large enough for anything very ambitious and Adrian Allsopp’s choreography is impressively bold.
That can’t be said for much of the acting, which has an over-the-top swagger about it. But then it’s tough bringing life to spoof-Western lines such as “Milly, don’t get yaself in no big fret”, or, just before the brothers kidnap their prospective spouses, “We ain’t trappin’ bears, we trappin’ women”. And although Shona Lindsay brings vocal sweetness and some force of character to Milly, Dave Willetts’s Adam relies too much on built-in charisma and needs both to sharpen his diction and ensure that his singing voice doesn’t grind like a threshing machine at climaxes.
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Still, it’s mildly touching when he modifies his belief in male superiority and agrees that, as the song says, a woman’s place is beside and not behind her man. Meanwhile, the kidnapped women do what’s expected in sentimental musicals, which is . . . well, see the show for yourselves if you’ve an evening to spare.
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