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This musical adaptation of John Waters’ comedy of teen rebellion in 1950s America was not a big hit when it opened on Broadway in 2008. Why not? It is a deliciously satirical creation: dark, silly and utterly delightful. It sends up not only a genre of musicals that feature teen love across the divide, from West Side Story to Grease, but acerbically pokes fun at Wasp-y values and America itself – from its constitution to its sense of exceptionalism.
This first professional UK production was long overdue, and in director Mehmet Ergen’s hands it is a firecracker of a show – faster, funnier and more intelligent than so much other retro teen musical fare in the West End.
It takes us to Baltimore, where the upper-class “squares” are at war with the leather-clad “drapes” – though they rather ridiculously enact their enmity through singing battles. The titular rebel Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker (Adam Davidson), in his sleeveless leather jerkin and bandana, is a drape while “good girl” Allison (Lulu-Mae Pears) is the square who instantly falls for him.
Where the 1990 film (starring an electric Johnny Depp) is more absurdist, there is more plot in the adaptation. This is an America that buzzes with McCarthyist anxiety and panic over the atomic bomb. The first scene features a polio inoculation picnic and the reprised song I’m Infected encapsulates not just the infectious nature of love but “respectable” America’s fear of a “diseased” underclass.
Performances shine with eyebrow-raised irony. So do the songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger. The music is a highly infectious mix of rockabilly, blues and swing, and lyrics explode with gleeful satire and ironies that make you laugh out loud. A small band sit on an exposed mezzanine level and create an astonishing sound.
Allison looks like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz at the start (“My grandmother told me never to loosen up. It’s not upper class”) but gathers shades of Rocky Horror’s Janet as she ventures into sexual rebellion, and Pears has a fabulous singing voice. Davidson matches her in scrubbed-faced wholesomeness as Cry-Baby, despite the bad-boy leathers, and is an impressive dancer.
His posse bring thrilling characterisation too, from pregnant Pepper (Jazzy Phoenix) to “Hatchet-Face” Mona (Kingsley Morton), while Chad Saint Louis as Dupree blows the roof off with songs such as Jukebox Jamboree, as does Eleanor Walsh as Cry-Baby’s stalker, with Screw Loose.
It is all as darkly exhilarating as The Producers (the book is co-written by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, the latter of whom also wrote the book for Mel Brooks’s musical). And like the most recent London production of that show, this is inventively staged in a modestly sized space, with performers using the entirety of the auditorium. Chris Whittaker’s choreography – an amusingly twirling pastiche – becomes more sophisticated in the ensemble numbers without seeming cramped.
Robert Innes Hopkins’ set design is light on its feet, with banners raised and lowered like the American flag for changing scenes, and the star-spangled banner projected on a back wall. And who can fail to feel the bite of the last song, Nothing Bad, which insists that things couldn’t be better in America? The irony carries forward, to chime with America’s endeavour to make itself great again.
