Book: Harry Hill
Music and Lyrics: Steve Brown
Director: Peter Rowe
“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones”.
Shakespeare was writing about Julius Caesar but – notwithstanding the fact that he is, at the time of writing 
at least, still very much alive – the same could be said about Tony Blair. It’s with a certain inevitability then that this production, a running gag about fox hunting aside, skips quickly over his many achievements in office and sends us away with an impression of an opportunist in thrall to Bush’s United States, who involved the UK in four wars.
Given the difficulties of compressing 70 years into a show running for just two hours what the creative team have chosen to include is necessarily selective. We get a brisk run through Blair’s early life and soon find ourselves at Oxford where he famously becomes lead singer of a band, before joining a law firm where he meets his wife, and swiftly on to his political career.
Up front is Jack Whittle as Blair, complete with trademark grin, giving us a pretty accurate portrayal of the man, personable and likeable. Whittle has good comic timing and is vocally strong as he delivers his several numbers through the show. Indeed, the same can be said about the rest of the cast of nine too – each one gives us the ideal combination of slightly caricatured portrayal that you need for this sort of show, with the solid vocals and good comedy required in a satirical show that’s played for laughs from start to finish.
Some of the characters portrayed inevitably stand out – Tori Burgess as a Lady Macbeth-like Cheri Blair, Phil Sealey’s dour and unsmiling Gordon Brown, Emma Jay Thomas as a Princess Diana who appears angel-like, even before her death. This is not to take away anything from the rest of the cast, who each play their part in adding to the fun. Sealey also gives us a Groucho Marx-like Saddam Hussein, with his moustache and cigar, memorable for his performance of I Never Done Anything Wrong.
Musically we get a range of styles from Gilbert & Sullivan through classic Musical Theatre to Sondheim which adds to the variety but does lead to the feeling that the vast array of music – there are 27 numbers listed in a relatively short show – means that the songs don’t always add to the narrative but instead seem to have been included for their comedy value alone. Lyrically they’re sound, with some witty stuff going on, and musically often catchy but unmemorable and – even granted it’s called a Rock Opera – there’s maybe just too much of it.
We finish the show with a song you might well go home humming though, called The Whole Wide World – a reminder that, for all you may remember about Iraq, there are many countries run by people you’d rather not have in charge.
Tony! appears at the REP not long after their production of Spitting Image, and with recent productions of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump musicals also doing the rounds, it seems as though there’s an appetite for political lampooning again. If you’re expecting an accurate political history lesson you’ll be disappointed – although you may find things here that you didn’t know. If on the other hand, you want an amusing but forgettable couple of hours going over the life of one of the most successful yet divisive characters in recent British history, then this is the place to be.
Runs until 10 June 2023 and on tour
The Reviews Hub Score
Entertaining but forgettable
