It has no Bottom, but High Society has similarities to Shakespeare’s comedy, with its mixed-up couples, camp glamour and night-time cavortings, but where the Shakespearian pairings are transformed by anointing with flower juice, in Cole Porter’s dry, sparkling musical, it is gin and champagne.
Yet The Dream (as I imagine actors call it) was written to be performed outdoors, where High Society has a more complicated provenance. It started as The Philadelphia Story — a stage play written specifically for Katharine Hepburn — became a film, then a musical film, and is now a stage musical. Perhaps this is why the dialogue at first seems too intimate and filmic to work in this context: the subtlety of the barbed wit was drowned out by the volume that the actors had to work at, even with the help of discreet microphones. I was disappointed, too, at the beginning, when the title song struck up and turned out to sound completely different from the tune Louis Armstrong sings at the start of the film. Looking up, I saw an early autumn leaf flutter to the stage.
After 10 minutes, I was loving it. My ear attuned itself to the rhythm of the dialogue, the wisecracks, the songs and the dancing started coming, and I forgot my preconceptions. If I had wanted to see Louis, Frank, Bing, Grace and the other one, I could have stayed in and rented the movie.
The story, you remember, concerns Tracy Lord, the only rich, posh Tracy there has ever been, a woman who is getting married for the second time, on this occasion to an old bore with embarrassing socks. The wedding is infiltrated by a writer and photographer working for the sort of magazine that has caused such distress to the Douglas-Zeta-Joneses. There is also a dad who has a liking for showgirls, a long-suffering mum, a precocious younger sister, an Uncle Willie who is always pissed and appears to have Alzheimer’s disease, and Dexter, the suave ex-husband who is still pining for Tracy and who, we can be sure, will get her in the end.
Dale Rapley, playing Dexter, caused some controversy in my camp. He sang and acted well, but I felt his trousers didn’t quite fit his dancing, while his hairstyle was frankly silly. However, my girlfriend found him very sexy, a sentiment endorsed by the two young American women to our right, who praised his Bryan Ferry-style moves.
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I’m not much of a one for dancing onstage — it can feel embarrassing — but there was some nifty footwork going on, especially from Annette McLaughlin as Tracy and the impressive Tracie Bennett, as Liz, the perky reporter, who is small with a big voice and performs the masterclass feat of sprinting backwards across the stage in stilettos while still speaking.
The first half is fun, and Porter’s songs still dazzle with a wit and melody that you rarely find in modern musicals. Only English reserve prevented me and, I noticed, several neighbouring audience members from singing along loudly with Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and True Love. The song Little One has not aged well, but only because, in the current News of the World climate, it has the same undertone that means we don’t hear Maurice Chevalier’s Thank Heaven for Little Girls on the radio much any more.
The show gathers pace in the second half as the party before the wedding unfolds in exuberant, drunken shenanigans and then hung-over remorse. Somewhere in here, there is a point about alcohol struggling to be made: Dexter is a reformed alcoholic, although this doesn’t prevent him from preferring Tracy when she has been at the champagne. Any serious intent is easily forgotten in the upbeat American energy of Well, Did You Evah?, You’re Sensational and the like.
The cast were great and the band hustled the songs along enthusiastically. Among several excellent comic performances, I especially enjoyed Brigit Forsyth’s brilliant delivery, and peculiar frocks, as Tracy’s mother. Claire Redcliffe gently mocked her own cutesiness and fell flat on her face upstage at one point. She laughed. The cast laughed. We all laughed. The chorus playing the staff of the house were impeccably led by John Conroy’s lugubrious butler.
Finally, my congratulations to the director, Ian Talbot, who kept in the ageing but delightful joke about the Lords being so rich that their private tennis coach is Fred Perry. The rain never came and it all turned out happily in the end. As we left, I noted there was a production of The Dream this season. I’ll probably be there.
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John Peter is away
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Arthur Smith is appearing in Dante’s Inferno by Arthur Smith at Metro Gilded Balloon Wine Bar, Edinburgh, August 15-25