Déjà vu swiftly sets in during Howard Goodall’s new musical. It’s based on Charles Dickens’ epic novel A Tale of Two Cities, but it’s not the familiarity of its classic literary source that makes it feel so troublingly predictable. Smoke billows, ranks of ragged revolutionaries glare into the stalls, battle songs are sung and banners unfurled. This is Les Mis lite.
Goodall has transposed the Parisian half of the original story to St Petersburg, but many of its characters survive in recognisable, if renamed, form.
Nevertheless, Two Cities owes at least as much to Boublil and Schönberg, creators of the blockbuster musical of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, as it does to Dickens. Joanna Read’s flaccid, flagrantly derivative production is partly at fault; but the similarities between the two shows go beyond the superficial.
Here, once again, is a jaunty number for prostitutes in corsets and feathers; here’s a trio for a love triangle to sing; here’s a tortured duet between a daughter and her much-wronged father. Here, above all, is music that seems to aim for the pulsing dramatic urgency and huge, heartfelt musical soliloquies of Boublil and Schönberg’s score, but lacks solid melodies and emotional impetus.
It doesn’t help that Goodall’s lyrics are hopelessly trite and Read’s book is worse; nor that the characterisation is thin and the acting on the whole unpersuasive. Ben Goddard as the émigré Yevgeny Irtenev is stolid and colourless, and Stefan Bednarczyk as his sadistic father is practically a pantomime villain. David Ricardo-Pearce is more charismatic as the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton, and Rosalie Craig is watchable as a head-girlish Lucy, object of both Irtenev and Carton’s affections — though she and Ricardo-Pearce both fail to impress vocally. Glyn Kerslake as Lucy’s long-last dad, Dr Manislav, overdoes the traumatised anguish, but his voice is powerful and at least his performance is committed. The supporting cast of bloodthirsty Bolsheviks don’t convince for a second.
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It’s a great shame that, having relocated the tale to Russia, Goodall didn’t give his score a more Slavic flavour, and that Read didn’t create a genuine sense of place and history. As it is, Two Cities seems slightly pointless, given that over 20 years ago Boublil and Schönberg did a far, far better thing.
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