★★★

“The script is rich and lyrical although the elaborate metaphors occasionally lose their way”

We know Miss Havisham as the heartless manipulator of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. She is indelibly printed on our minds – dressed in cobwebs and a faded wedding gown, time frozen on the day she was jilted.

But how did she arrive at such an horrendous fate?

In her earnest solo production, writer and performer Heather Alexander aims to put paper-thin flesh on brittle bones, creating an origin story for the striking monster. She takes Miss Havisham from the misery of her childhood to the edge of love and fulfilment. The story that emerges is one of bitterness that accumulates over time like a hardening residue.

Under Dominique Gerrard’s formal direction, the busy set foretells of an eerie fate. It is dressed with bridal gowns and white veils, a clock ticking obtrusively but forever fixed at 20 minutes to nine.

Centre stage, there is a bed – or is it a coffin? Ghostly Miss Havisham rises from her slumber to tell a tale of a motherless girl, confused, unloved and fearful of God, death and her brutish father.

There is something of Norma “Sunset Boulevard” Desmond in Alexander’s feline physicality and phrasing: wide eyes, angular posing and an epic grandeur forever tumbling towards tantrum.

Her tragic isolation is underscored by her differences: rich amid the poor, girl among boys, a child with everything but nothing that matters. In a pivotal school room blunder she confuses Medusa for an angel and becomes in her own mind, a bad girl, a cursed girl, destined only to wound and harden hearts.

After a poor start in life, matters get worse, and the first act is a testing run of merciless catastrophes. The script is rich and lyrical although the elaborate metaphors occasionally lose their way. (Is “jumping into the box of life” really an image of freedom and exploration?)

After the rigours of the first act – where the tone is relentlessly morbid – Miss Havisham finally blossoms. She emerges in London a young woman capable of catching the eye of James, a dashing actor who appears loving and attentive if, er, unreliable.

Dotted about the story are reminders of the culmination – Satis House, a tragic girl named Stella, the ominous marshes hiding secrets in their billowing fog. We wonder if this Miss Havisham will grow sufficiently to match Dickens’ capacious version. We sit like engineers planning a trans-continental railway hoping the tracks from east and west will meet precisely.

The answer is: not quite, but only out by an inch or two.

Dickens’ Havisham is necessarily a gothic horror, a fully-formed, self-starting force of vengeance and malevolence. Alexander’s is a more modern interpretation: a woman as a reaction to her environment and trauma, a pitiful victim of men and their predations.

In an accomplished display, Heather Alexander fully embodies this icon of literature. It is a well-organised portrayal; perhaps not the baroque portrait it aspires to be but, instead, a chilling mosaic compiled from fragments and shards.

CRY-BABY, THE MUSICAL

Arcola Theatre

★★★★★

“Feel-good is the understatement of the year where this show is concerned”

‘It’s a beautiful day for an anti-polio picnic’. So begins the new all-singing, all-dancing “Cry-Baby, The Musical”. This is no surprise if you are armed with the knowledge that the musical is based on the transgressive filmmaker John Waters’ 1990 film. Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan have written the book, with David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger providing the songs. Directed by the Arcola Theatre’s artistic director, Mehmet Ergen, it bursts onto the London stage with an effervescent eccentricity that Waters would be proud of with all his screwball heart.

A couple of words of advice. Leave your expectations at home, along with any judgements, preconceptions or theatrical snobbery. Don’t read the programme notes – the ones that allude to the show dealing with issues of class-based injustices, political relevance, privilege, demonisation… blah blah blah. It really isn’t that deep. Yes, they’re all in there somewhere, cleverly hidden in hilarious, blink-and-you-miss one-liners, but the trick is to just wallow in the whole explosion of joy that this show bombards you with. The story is as shallow as they come. A kind of ‘Grease’ meets ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – but better than both put together. It is 1954. Communism is the big taboo. Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker is the coolest kid in town. He’s a rebel with a cause. A bad guy – though we kind of twig pretty quickly that he’s not really. Allison is the strait-laced rich girl who crosses to the wrong side of the tracks, drawn to his irresistible flame. Forbidden love and teen rebellion run rife while society moral values are turned upside down.

Adam Davidson plays the eponymous ‘Cry-Baby’. His name derives from the fact that he hasn’t cried since his parents died and he was orphaned at a young age (we learn the circumstances of his mum and dad’s tragic demise later). He is the leader of the ‘Drapes’, a misfit crew of baddies with whom the ‘Squares’ (to which Lulu-Mae Pears’ clean-cut Allison belongs) are in awe of, yet fear, in equal measure. Allison has been brought up by her grandmother, the (seemingly) upright Mrs Cordelia Vernon-Williams (Shirley Jameson). Surrounded by a magnificent kaleidoscope of colourful characters, all performed by an even more magnificent cast, the narrative roller-coasts through picnics, self-awareness days, song contests, arson attacks, prison, escape, freedom, atonement, justice, hard-won-love… right up to its preposterously upbeat finale. All the while our smiles get wider and wider, the laughs get stronger, and our toe-tapping turns into all-out body shaking. Feel-good is the understatement of the year where this show is concerned.

The score must have been one of the easiest to write. There’s irony in that statement, but a snippet of truth too. The entire set list is pure pastiche. The chord structures have been handed to Javerbaum and Schlesinger on a plate. Each song is instantly recognisable, yet bizarrely unique. It’s the lyrics that can take the credit – insanely clever, witty and poignant. The writers are masters of rhyming and scanning, and the performers deliver faultlessly. We are transported back to the fifties with the genre defining songs: the close-knit harmonies of ‘Squeaky Clean’, or the rockabilly rhythms of ‘Jukebox Jamboree’. Ballads such as ‘Misery’ and ‘I’m Infected’ tug at our teenage heartstrings and rekindle the memories of our misspent teenage years. The bar is high, but there still manage to be highlights. Shirley Jameson’s ‘Did Something Wrong Once’ threatens to bring the house down, as does Chad Saint Louis (who plays bad boy Dupree) every time he opens his mouth, and lungs. Davidson and Pears smash every number they sing. The ensemble players are, without exception, exceptional. Eleanor Walsh, in particular, as Lenora Frigid (don’t blame me – I didn’t name the characters), whose solo number ‘Screw Loose’ defines her perfectly. Bonkers? Yes! Virtuosic? Without doubt! And how can you fail to enjoy a musical that includes song titles such as ‘Girl Can I Kiss You with Tongues?’ Forget the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’. This show combines the too. Ridiculous? Yes! Sublime? Without a doubt!

You don’t need a big stage to create a spectacle. Chris Whittaker’s choreography shifts the walls outwards, playing with scale and creating deceptively big routines. Meticulously period yet innovative, it encapsulates the show’s energy and sense of fun. Shades of Jerome Robbins in no way eclipse Whittaker’s own individuality. Like every element of the show, familiarity and peculiarity dance side by side.

The finale number – a rousing ‘Nothing Bad’ – sums it up. “Cry-Baby, The Musical” is two hours of star-spangled fun. You’d be a cry-baby to miss it (I know…!). All I can say is ‘be there… or be square’.

HAVISHAM

Jack Studio Theatre

★★★

“The script is rich and lyrical although the elaborate metaphors occasionally lose their way”

HAVISHAM

Jack Studio Theatre

Reviewed on 13th March 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Peter Mould

Previously reviewed at this venue:

HAVISHAM

HAVISHAM

HAVISHAM

CRY-BABY, THE MUSICAL

Arcola Theatre

★★★★★

“Feel-good is the understatement of the year where this show is concerned”