Judi Herman is a freelance writer, broadcaster and producer, working mainly for BBC Radio World Service and the BBC’s main UK speech network, [Radio 4]. She specialises in making radio features on arts and entertainment, religion, education, travel and human-interest stories. Among programmes to which she contributes regularly are the World Service Arts and Entertainment Magazine The Ticket, the World Service Heart and Soul Series and Radio Four’s flagship magazine programme Woman’s Hour. She also writes regular theatre reviews for the influential UK theatre website Whatsonstage.com and is a guest performing arts lecturer at Middlesex University Judi has written several stage shows, including How the West End Was Won, a show celebrating Jewish life in the West End of London, commissioned to accompany the London Jewish Museum's exhibition Living Up West; and Stones of Kolin, a play with music, charting six hundred years of Jewish life in a small Czech town, performed in both London and Kolin in the Czech Republic. She’s also worked in Public Relations, including theatre PR, so she reckons she knows the theatre business from more sides than most! Judi lives near London with Steve, her husband of thirty years. They have a son and a daughter in their early twenties – and the family is completed by a Bedlington Terrier puppy called Bertie! E-mail : judi_herman@hotmail.com
Currently there’s a rare chance here in London to see the very first musical with both words and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, written back in 1954. This was three years before he wrote the lyrics for West Side Story, but thanks to a set of unlucky circumstances, it did not officially premiere until December 1997, and Primavera’s production at the intimate Jermyn Street Theatre is only the second in the UK and features two numbers never before heard in a production in this country.
Saturday Night is set in Flatbush, Brooklyn in 1929 and it’s based on Front Porch in Flatbush, a play by the Epstein brothers who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Casablanca. It tells the story of a group of aspirational young people with plenty of hopes and dreams, but not much in the way of means. And as they ask each other in the show’s title song, all of them are much exercised with what you can do on a Saturday night. As anyone who can remember being young and single will know, if you’ve no date on a Saturday night -or even worse you’re at a loose end too – you are a real loser!
They are as motley and high-spirited a group of young people as you might meet on the London Underground on a Saturday night today – and the guys are so cash strapped that the girls might have to pay their way even if they constitute ‘hot dates’! For the guys argue hotly among themselves about who pays for what from subway tickets to candy at the movies. Cash strapped they may be, but the guys have found the means somehow to go into a syndicate to buy some dodgy sounding shares, thanks to wide boy Gene Gorman who has ideas above his station and enough chutzpah to take their money, sell off his richer cousin’s car and gate-crash swanky Manhatten parties on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge.
To put all this in context, just look again at the date in which all this is happening – 1929, on the eve of the Wall Street crash – and getting across that bridge out of suburban Brooklyn and into Downtown Manhatten is what so many people did (and presumably still do) aspire to achieve.
The bunch of hopefuls congregating on those front porches in Flatbush have no idea that the markets are about to spiral out of control and the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression await them. So although the show can afford an upbeat ending, the audiences for whom it was intended in 1954 would have had the benefit or wry hindsight; and it’s no wonder that Primavera is staging this timely revival as we find ourselves teetering over a similar precipice.
Primavera has time on its side too, for its bright young cast are just the right age to play these wannabes and they look and mostly do the business just fine and dandy. Whether or not casting actor/musicians is right for this musical, it’s certainly right for the intimate space of the Jermyn Street Theatre, smaller than any orchestra pit! Audiences do get a sense of sharing the space with the performers, and with no room for much of a set, it’s largely down to the actors and the costume designer to build on the tight sense of time and place provided by Sondheim.
And although sometimes the music and singing are a little unbalanced and there’s the odd bum note, this is more than outweighed by the sense of period and character the cast succeed in putting over with a winning exuberance. In this they are hugely helped by Tim Jackson’s sparky choreography and musical staging, successfully fitting a cast of twelve on to this pocket-size stage and Victoria Johnstone’s luscious authentic-looking costumes.
Getting your girl or your guy – or at least a girl or a guy – are as much at the heart of the story as making a mint on the markets. And of course the central couple, posh Helene Forrester, aka just plain Helen Fogel and the wheeling dealing Gene, who meet outside the posh do into which neither of them quite manage to blag their way, are made for each other. But first they have to realise they can also be honest with each other - and Helen has to get it through Gene’s head that his fantasising is a recipe for disaster. Gene’s sharp suit and Helene’s flapper frock are more than amply filled by David Ricardo–Pearce and Helena Blackman. She proves that she was a worthy runner up in the How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? Reality TV show seeking a lead for The Sound of Music (won by Carrie Fisher), with her fine interpretations of both the comic and the more serious and intense numbers.
There’s splendid support, especially from the girls. Joanna Hickman (a fine Beth in John Doyle’s production of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along at the Watermill and Johanna in the number one tour of Doyle’s award-winning production of Sweeney Todd) is touchingly convincing as the one clear-eyed down-to-earth gal in the gang – Celeste, who is actually content with her lot as a struggling young married.
Joanna Hollister is a scream as hearty, horsey would-be flapper Mildred – the best friend who is everyone’s fall back date as ‘injury time’ looms on a Saturday night … and Charlie Cameron, who is a lovely mover, makes the most of a small part, quite delicious as hanger on Florence teetering daintily towards becoming a lush in her ongoing search for a speakeasy.
The sharp-eyed punter will spot that Helen’s real name – Fogel – has a distinctly Jewish ring – as indeed has Gorman. Since the writers of book and songs are Jewish, it’s not surprising that these young residents of Flatbush might turn out to be coreligionists, but this is not really an issue here. The message – contentment lies in making the best of what you can reasonably get – is universal.
But is Saturday night essential viewing for the Sondheim aficionado? I think it is –for although for my money, the tunes are less memorable than what was to come after, it’s fascinating to hear the magical wordsmith flexing his rhyming muscles and experiment with so many different moods and styles in the musical numbers, including in yer face songs for gangs of guys like the title song, radiant love songs like A Moment with You, point numbers like the delightful In the Movies and so on to the exuberant life-affirming finale One Wonderful Day.
Years ago the late, very great humourist Alan Coren wrote a comic piece in which two girl assistants at one of the almost as much lamented Woolworths stores are so educated that when they compare notes about their Saturday night dates, Doreen reveals she’s been taken to see Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. And passing judgement on a piece she evidently knows well, she opines that she wouldn’t have bothered to dress up if she’d known where her date was taking her ‘A short skirt’s good enough for early bloody Schoenberg!’, she says tartly. Is a short skirt good enough for ‘early bloody’ Sondheim? Yes, but only if it’s a sassy little flapper number in which you can really swing to those shiny young numbers …!
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Saturday Night is currently running at Arts Theatre London WC2 until 11 April - the box office number is 0044 (0)207 836 2132 web address www.arts-theatre-london.co.uk
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