Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6

reviewed for The Times, 29th June 2016

Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6
Image credit: Tristram Kenton

Remember Bugsy Malone? It’s 40 years since Alan Parker’s film, in which cheeky children play at being prepubescent gangsters waging a bitter turf war over the prohibited soda-pop supply. The Lyric Hammersmith knew it was on to a winner last year with the director Sean Holmes’s production of the live musical, so it’s back with a new bunch of stage-school kids singing their hearts out. These precocious performers are earnest rather than polished, cute but never cutesy. And for all the luscious production values, this Bugsy Malone retains the joyous collectivity of a village barn dance.

Jon Bausor’s designs transport us back to the era of the speakeasy, where we meet the flailing kingpin Fat Sam (Max Gill on press night); the cheerful hustler-cum-boxing-manager Bugsy (Adryan Dorset-Pitt) and the beautiful Blousey (Tabitha Knowles), who is desperate to sing at Sam’s dive. The “bad guys” of the show’s most famous number don’t shoot their enemies dead, but put losers out of action with splurge-guns that spray gunk. Yet in Holmes’s hands, this Asterix-violence is never quite harmless; the darkness of the adult world is latent below the surface.

Fortunately, Bugsy is there to save the day, with a healthy dollop of team spirit, social justice and generosity. He’s backed up by a grown-up ensemble of chorus girls, beggars and boxers. Barely out of school themselves, they don’t always give Drew McOnie’s imaginative choreography the synchronicity it deserves, but there’s a superb cameo from Damian Buhagiar as Cagey Joe in McOnie’s stonking storytelling number, So You Wanna Be a Boxer.

Most of the younger cast, who rotate nightly, are better singers than they are actors, but on press night the supporting roles shone brightest. Elliot Aubrey enchants as the dreaming dancer Fizzy and Rhianna Dorris smoulders as the sultry Tallulah.

Holmes has jettisoned the 1970s sense of infantile sexuality that marked Parker’s film; Tallulah’s big number, once sung by a vampish Jodie Foster hot from Taxi Driver, is speeded up from the original siren slow-dance into a jolly jig. Gloriously good, clean fun.