Cry-Child, the Musical evaluation – John Waters’ teen rebels could have you in tears of pleasure | Stage

This musical adaptation of John Waters’ comedy of youngster rise up in Fifties America was not a giant hit when it opened on Broadway in 2008. Why not? It’s a deliciously satirical creation: darkish, foolish and totally pleasant. It sends up not solely a style of musicals that function teen love throughout the divide, from West Aspect Story to Grease, however acerbically pokes enjoyable at Wasp-y values and America itself – from its structure to its sense of exceptionalism.

This primary skilled UK manufacturing was lengthy overdue, and in director Mehmet Ergen’s fingers it’s a firecracker of a present – sooner, funnier and extra clever than a lot different retro teen musical fare within the West Finish.

It takes us to Baltimore, the place the upper-class “squares” are at struggle with the leather-clad “drapes” – although they reasonably ridiculously enact their enmity via singing battles. The titular insurgent Wade “Cry-Child” Walker (Adam Davidson), in his sleeveless leather-based jerkin and bandana, is a drape whereas “good woman” Allison (Lulu-Mae Pears) is the sq. who immediately falls for him.

The place the 1990 movie (starring an electrical Johnny Depp) is extra absurdist, there may be extra plot within the adaptation. That is an America that buzzes with McCarthyist nervousness and panic over the atomic bomb. The primary scene encompasses a polio inoculation picnic and the reprised track I’m Contaminated encapsulates not simply the infectious nature of affection however “respectable” America’s concern of a “diseased” underclass.

Performances shine with eyebrow-raised irony. So do the songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger. The music is a extremely infectious mixture of rockabilly, blues and swing, and lyrics explode with gleeful satire and ironies that make you snort out loud. A small band sit on an uncovered mezzanine stage and create an astonishing sound.

Allison seems like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz initially (“My grandmother informed me by no means to loosen up. It’s not higher class”) however gathers shades of Rocky Horror’s Janet as she ventures into sexual rise up, and Pears has a superb singing voice. Davidson matches her in scrubbed-faced wholesomeness as Cry-Child, regardless of the bad-boy leathers, and is a formidable dancer.

His posse deliver thrilling characterisation too, from pregnant Pepper (Jazzy Phoenix) to “Hatchet-Face” Mona (Kingsley Morton), whereas Chad Saint Louis as Dupree blows the roof off with songs reminiscent of Jukebox Jamboree, as does Eleanor Walsh as Cry-Child’s stalker, with Screw Free.

It’s all as darkly exhilarating as The Producers (the e-book is co-written by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, the latter of whom additionally wrote the e-book for Mel Brooks’s musical). And like the latest London manufacturing of that present, that is inventively staged in a modestly sized house, with performers utilizing the whole lot of the auditorium. Chris Whittaker’s choreography – an amusingly twirling pastiche – turns into extra subtle within the ensemble numbers with out seeming cramped.

Robert Innes Hopkins’ set design is gentle on its toes, with banners raised and lowered just like the American flag for altering scenes, and the star-spangled banner projected on a again wall. And who can fail to really feel the chew of the final track, Nothing Unhealthy, which insists that issues couldn’t be higher in America? The irony carries ahead, to chime with America’s endeavour to make itself nice once more.