FeaturedLondonMusicalReview

Jerry’s Girls – Menier Chocolate Factory, London

Reviewer: Scott Matthewman

Music and Lyrics: Jerry Herman

Original concepts: Larry Alford, Wayne Cilento and Jerry Herman

Director: Hannah Chissick

Very few composers of musical theatre have enough stature to have effectively become their own subgenre of the form. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Lloyd Webber, maybe. But among their number is the composer of some of the grandest and campiest of them all – Jerry Herman.

The composer of Hello, Dolly!, Mack and Mabel and La Cage aux Folles was the co-creator of Jerry’s Girls, a greatest hits-style revue which rockets around the composer’s back catalogue. There’s no story to follow, although director Hannah Chiswick and the cast often give emotional throughlines from song to song. Instead, it’s an opportunity to revel in a back catalogue that reminds us just how deliciously fun musical theatre can be.

Paul Farnsworth’s set places us in the shared dressing room of three performers, bulb-rimmed mirrors illuminating Jessica Martin, Cassidy Janson and Julie Yammannee. From time to time, a red curtain is pulled across, giving the sense of an old-time variety hall. That’s really all you need to witness three women who revel in the humour and the romance of Herman’s scores. It works crazily well here – except for a few occasions in Act I when, while dressed as cinema ushers, the cast performs in the aisles on either side of the shallow but wide audience seating. This renders the performers nearly invisible from many seats.

But apart from that small misstep, the trio entertains throughout. Martin, an accomplished comedy performer, is especially adept at mining the layers within the work. Whether it’s the broad physicality of Take It All Off – where, as a veteran burlesque dancer, the audience implores her to put it all back on, as a grumpy Santa in We Need a Little Christmas (from Mame) or as the great Dolly Levi, Martin really knows how to bring the best out of every number.

She is matched, of course, by her costars. Julie Yammannee straddles genres just as effectively, delivering gut punches of emotionality in her slower numbers while revelling in the opportunity to show her lighter side. The trio is capped by Cassidy Janson, one of the West End’s most effortlessly charismatic performers, showing why Herman’s music is so perfect for her. From the heartbreak of I Won’t Send Roses to the kookiness of the trio’s ensemble numbers, it’s clear that this material is right up Janson’s street, thus elevating the performer, her costars and the musical numbers.

For all the crazy comedy, including a rendition of Mack & Mabel’s Tap Your Troubles Away that foregoes tap shoes for the click-clack of manual typewriters, it is the slower, more contained numbers that show that Jerry Herman is more than the big, glitzy showpieces that first come to mind. But even in the smallest moments, of a woman sitting alone musing on life, Herman’s heart is enormous.

And that is what this joyous, celebratory production of Jerry’s Girls conveys so well. In the final number, the performers pay tribute to the decades of women who have performed in his musicals – from Carol Channing and Chita Rivera to themselves, and even look forward to Imelda Staunton’s forthcoming turn in Hello, Dolly! The Menier’s production has earned its stars a place in that roster and proves that Jerry Herman’s works retain their position at the heart of musical theatre.

Continues until 29 June 2024

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The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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