Happy Days

This was the first night of the tour for this new musical based on the characters and situations of the cult TV series Happy Days. It's 1959 and the kids are about to graduate and go their separate ways, but before they go, news just in that Arnold's might be flattened for a car park and shopping mall. Can the kids save the day? Will the Fonz come through for them? Will the boys and girls sing and dance their little hearts out? 

Well, that's the set up, simple, unsophisticated and brash, just like the original TV series, and with Henry Winkler as creative consultant what could possibly go wrong? I'm afraid, quite a bit.

Apart from the theme song, the music was instantly forgetable and lacked any deep reference to the period (one which most of the audience and very few of the cast had lived through). The opening song, in which everyone seemed to appear and sing, was so muddy that I could barely make out any of the words and there were times when faces were unlit on stage (especially the first kitchen scene) but the complex set worked well and provided a range of quick change locations with us being distracted from the mechanics each time by a well placed off-line dance or interaction. The band was suitably punchy but the singing was, with the exception of Cheryl Baker, without emotion as was the dancing, for all its enthusiasm. These people really did not inhabit their characters, the era or the context of this piece. Dialogue was almost universally shouted (you are miked up people!) and delivered out front at breakneck speed without pause which sucked all the life out of it. Elvis and James Dean were so wide of the mark as to be cringeworthy and the Fonz ... well, ok, that's a pretty well impossible act to follow but the Fonz is not in the thumbs, or the growl, its in your head ... it appeared that Ben Freeman no more believed that he was the Fonz than we did. 

After the break I spotted a few empty seats around me and at the end of the show, when the cast came back for a sing-along, get-up-and-dance medley, much of the audience took the chance to beat a hasty retreat. I hope the show grows into itself and settles down, I wish the cast well .... but for me this was a bit of a shocker.