The creators of this new musical might seem to be on a hiding to nothing. The original Oscar-winning film of 1968 starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as Ratso and Joe Buck respectively – low-rent hustlers in feral New York – already has attached to it some of the best music ever written for film.
Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’ is an eternal hit and John Barry’s theme featuring Toots Thielemans’ achingly soulful harmonica is the very sound of solitude. So why would anyone think that what this story needs is more music?
This new musical with a book by playwright Bryony Lavery attempts to slay the ghost of the film by declaring itself to be adapted from James Leo Herlihy’s original novel. Yet it can’t escape the movie. The first number is Nilsson’s impossible-to-ignore classic. From then the score by the Novello-winning Francis “Eg” White takes over. It serves the story well and there is a proper showstopper in the form of Whatever It Is You’re Doing smokily sung by a captivating Tori Allen-Martin as Cass.
She is Joe’s first conquest and delivers the song while adopting various sexual positions with the newbie hapless stud who ends up paying her instead of the other way round. As the show attempts to convey the seedy underbelly of New York at the end of the 1960s it displays few inhibitions. The quote of the evening came from an overheard audience member at the interval who said: “I didn’t know where to look.” More problematically, comparisons with Voight and Hoffman are inevitable. As Joe, the wannabe gigolo in cowboy garb, Paul Jacob French brings the required swagger and naivety to the role, though his voice is incongruously very Bruce Springsteen, which is great yet altogether too streetwise for this man-sized boy. Max Bowden’s Ratso, meanwhile, seems modelled entirely on Hoffman’s Oscar-winning version.
It is a more than decent portrayal with Bowden capturing the wasted intelligence of the vagrant. But it also highlights the question hovering over this show. Why do it?
The curiosity value of how director John Schlesinger’s famous film will translate on stage can only partially be the draw. For anyone under a certain age musically informing a story about male friendship set in dystopic New York is not reason enough.
The sense that the main reason is that the intellectual property of the film and book were available, just won’t go away.
Midnight Cowboy
Southwark Playhouse, Elephant
★★★
