'Viva!' but Maybe Not Forever

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/arts/09iht-lon09.html

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LONDON — Here’s one of the more polite questions that occurred to me midway through “Viva Forever!,” the show scored to the back catalog of the Spice Girls that brought a limp year for new musicals (that’s to say, 2012) to a sputtering halt: When is the production actually going to start?

To be sure, the director Paul Garrington’s staging had already been creaking along for an hour or so by the time the query popped into my head. But whereas some misbegotten shows do a self-evident crash-and-burn — or announce their ill-advised intentions with perverse gusto — “Viva Forever!” on opening night arrived at the halfway point as if everyone involved were, figuratively speaking, still waiting in the wings.

It wasn’t until curtain down that it became apparent that here was no epic “so-bad-it’s-good” clunker on the order of “Which Witch” or “King,” to cite two flop musicals of old that in their day also played the Piccadilly Theatre. Instead, this thematic follow-up to “Mamma Mia!,” the ongoing Abba-fueled phenomenon with which “Viva Forever!” shares several creative personnel, starting with the producer Judy Craymer, is in essence a small, sad show trapped inside the inevitably bludgeoning amount of hype.

Not that the Spice Girls themselves feature live in the show in any way. Yes, the glammed-up gals were on hand at the pre-Christmas premiere and took to the stage at the close of the performance for a photo opportunity marked out by the apparently unyielding sullenness of Posh Spice (aka Victoria Beckham), who seemed to regard her erstwhile colleagues with the level of enthusiasm Macbeth reserves for the ghost of Banquo.

But for all the gathering talk over time about a piece that has been some while in the making (and, in fact, shed an initial director, the Tony-winning Marianne Elliott, very early on), the finished product seems bewilderingly inchoate. It’s as if all involved never got beyond the phase of thrashing out ideas on a napkin over a drink or two.

As it happens, alcohol might help soften resistance to a narrative that comes with its own degree of leglessness, to co-opt a wonderful British synonym for the state of inebriation in which one or another of the characters in “Viva Forever!” at various points find themselves.

Those familiar with “Mamma Mia!,” which after the success not just of the stage musical but of its 2008 film adaptation must be sizable swaths of the globe, will recognize this show’s central dynamic. Here once again is a single mother locked in tetchy if eventually loving combat with her daughter, both of whom will impart easily digested life lessons on the way to the preordained megamix finale.

It helps, I suppose, that the pop ballad “Mama” is among the 20-plus Spice Girls numbers folded with varying degrees of finesse into Jennifer Saunders’s surprisingly half-hearted script. But whereas “Mamma Mia!” takes place on a Greek island, thereby allowing for glimpses of sun and sea to go with an often scantily clad ensemble, “Viva Forever!” shifts between a houseboat in Camden Town in north London and the shallower byways of the reality-television industry.

Viva (Hannah-Jane Kamen), you have to understand, likes solidarity and girl power as much as the next fame-happy 19-year-old, but what is she to do when offered the opportunity to break away from her girl-group chums and go it alone, egged on by the vampy talent show judge, Simone, who becomes her mentor?

In that senior role, the dark-eyed Sally Dexter offers a caricature of a caricature, though “Viva Forever!” on Ms. Dexter’s résumé surely widens a breadth of work that includes the Royal Shakespeare Company and the original cast of the Patrick Marber play, “Closer.”

Tension on the home front accompanies the set-to over the fact that Viva is adopted between the questing young woman and her mother Lauren, a fun-loving soul played by Sally Ann Triplett with an easeful charm noticeably lacking elsewhere.

While offering a vague parallel to the parentage issues that crop up in “Mamma Mia!,” the angst raised by the specter of Viva’s biological mother is pretty much dropped before it has even begun in a second act that takes us to Spain — palm trees, hooray! — and then back to England, with everyone that little bit wiser. And hoarser.

While remarking upon the failure of the whole, cultural arbiters may ponder the significance of “Viva Forever!” in smaller ways, as well. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the weird first-act jab in the direction of Whitney Houston insomuch as this show opened within a week of “The Bodyguard,” the competing West End musical based on the 1992 Houston/Kevin Costner movie.

Social media obsessives, meanwhile, can thrill to the character of Minty (Hatty Preston), Simone’s poshly spoken personal assistant, who talks in Tweets, punctuating multiple lines with “hashtag,” that distinctive buzzword for our time. (She also gets a dreadful “Downton Abbey” joke that should be discarded, fast.) More puzzling is the inability of Ms. Saunders, as author of the book, to translate the amiable anarchy of her “Absolutely Fabulous” years into something that makes sense in the here and now.

On the other hand, it’s possible that this musical’s demographic won’t give a fig about any of the above as they await “Headlines,” “Spice Up Your Life” and “Wannabe,” to name just a few of the Spice Girls standards that get duly trotted out.

There’s also an equivalent to the Havana sequence in “Guys and Dolls” for those whose musical theater memories go back somewhat further than the cultural commodification that “Viva Forever!” condemns. And, let’s be honest, celebrates, as well.

Cheers, meanwhile, and cheers again for the two Alan Bennett one-acts that snuck into the National Theatre lineup just before the end of the year, offering both a bracing corrective to the same author’s full-length (and severely disappointing) “People” and, on their own terms, two of the most satisfying theater pieces in town.

“Hymn,” directed by Nadia Fall, revisits a piece first seen in 2001 in which the playwright looks back on his own musical past, both as a hapless would-be violinist and as an eager student in the repertoire of such defining British composers as Elgar, Delius and Butterworth. (And who had clocked before seeing this 30-minute piece that carthorse was an anagram for orchestra?)

The more recent, and substantial, “Cocktail Sticks” under Nicholas Hytner’s deeply engaged direction finds Mr. Bennett looking back with a mixture of rue, regret and abiding love on his parents, on his way toward the realization that “you don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” Alex Jennings plays Mr. Bennett in both plays, the younger man catching precisely the tweedy bemusement of the writer (and sometime actor) who is not far off 80.

The plays can be seen as a pair on occasional Sundays or as separate early-evening entertainments. However you choose to view them, they offer Mr. Bennett in reflective mode at his very best.

Viva Forever! Directed by Paul Garrington. Piccadilly Theatre. Open-ended run.

Hymn. Directed by Nadia Fall. National Theatre/Lyttelton. Through March 17.

Cocktail Sticks. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. National Theatre/Lyttelton. Through March 30.