TOM LEHRER IS TEACHING MATH AND DOESN’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU at Upstairs at the Gatehouse

★★

“There was more action in the archive LP recording than live on stage

It takes some effort to murder a Tom Lehrer song but, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You, managed to murder in spades. Luck has it that the show is already sold out for its short run – so read no further.

Upstairs At The Gatehouse in Highgate, to date has had a great reputation for putting on high quality musical revue shows with some of the world’s finest musical theatre writers and composers: delightful scripted chat, high production values and strong singing voices throughout. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

However, Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You, is a badly conceived play by Francis Beckett interspersed with 25 of Lehrer’s most famous songs. The premise, Iris (Nabilah Hamid) is a young Lehrer fan and would be journalist in 1970, who turns up unannounced at the home of Tom Lehrer (Shahaf Ifhar) to interview this very private man.

Sadly, in this two-hander, both the play and performances lack any substance. Shahaf Ifhar plays Lehrer’s deadpan comedic lines so flat, his Lehrer is boring – something that Lehrer most certainly is not. So many of the laugh lines went for nothing: “I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin Kaberetts of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.”

Neither actor can put across a musical number with any panache – and the direction by Isaac Bernier-Doyle (one of the new Co-Artistic Directors of Upstairs at the Gatehouse) hits all the wrong notes from the get-go; with the opening number I Got It From Agnes, performed as “it” being a physical typewriter and various desk stationary. The “it” in Lehrer’s seemingly innocent lyrics is most definitely venereal disease, in his genius and usually very funny satirical song with never a naughty word used. Satirical, being the operative word that is synonymous with Tom Lehrer.

Tom Lehrer’s most famous song, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, literally stopped dead halfway through, as Shahaf ran noisily off stage to bring on a park bench for the duo to sit on. The bench could have and should have been set in front of the upright piano from the top of the show (where pianist and musical director Harry Style plays). Throughout, the staging left a lot to be desired….

The natural interval was at the end of the song We Will All Go Together When We Go – the audience has just had a jolly sing-along and Iris walks off leaving Lehrer’s home. But the Lehrer character goes on to sing two further numbers before curtain down on Act One.

Act Two starts with an actual recording relayed over the sound system of Tom Lehrer performing; with his wonderful deadpan patter, brilliant piano playing and singing his hilarious rendition of Clementine. The Gatehouse theatre audience laughing spontaneously. A joyous moment. There was more action in the archive LP recording than live on stage.

The clunky script jumps 30 years, and again the now mature “stalker” journalist Iris returns to find Lehrer and again asks why did you stop performing, didn’t you enjoy the adoration of your audience (sic)? Too much script just spouting dates: the Vietnam war, That Was The Week That Was, the nuclear bomb, Trump, Nixon, Monica Lewinsky – and the show Tomfoolery, which was actually premiered in 1980 and not in 1982 as the script stated tonight in Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You….

The show finishes with Tom Lehrer’s sublime parody of popular music with his song The Elements – literally listing the names of all the chemical elements, to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General Song from The Pirates of Penzance. And I have to say both Hamid and Ifhar, alongside Harry Style, sung without a name out of place at great speed!

The play ends telling the audience that Tom Lehrer, who is still alive aged 96, transferred all songs he had ever written into the public domain, and in 2022 Lehrer formally relinquished the copyright/performing/recording rights on his songs, making them free for anyone to use – including a small theatre in North London……