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| Vanessa Valois -Amy Orman – Kristy Griffin – Photo Credit Ben Appleton |
Sweet Charity is a strange old mixture with its origins in a Fellini film and its American development having a book by Neil Simon, but it’s a piece with its own bittersweet morality.
And it was originally shaped by the great choreographer Bob Fosse.
At its centre and wonderfully dominating the show is Amy Orman as the somewhat naive but ever hopeful Charity, belting out song after song as she tells her story.
She’s working as a dance hall hostess but yearns for a better life.
Friends and co workers Nickie (Vanessa Valois) and Helene (Kristy Griffin) join her magnificently in that great hustlers’ number Hey Big Spender.
She meets Oscar (Joshua Kirk), who is a nervous young bloke right out of Neil Simon rather than Fellini and she hopes for a settled life with him.
Beautiful Simon stuff; they are trapped in a lift, he turns out to be full of neuroses well captured by Kirk and a settled life with him might be as much an illusion as is the strange world of Italian film star Vittorio (incisively self centred performance by Eamon McCaughan) that Charity also dabbles in.
You’ll know a lot of the songs and they are given a wholehearted performance by a strong cast.
It’s a show driven by the central character but it also depends very much upon teamwork and the capacity of members of the team to step briefly into sharp cameos. This cast rises to the challenges.
A splendidly spare set by Chris Zuber, easily manipulated by the cast, evokes settings from the dance hall to a broken down lift to Vittorio’s luxury apartment. Fiona Leach’s costumes give us a real glimpse of the 1960s.
And it is good to glimpse musical director Callum Tolhurst-Close and the orchestra driving the show upstage behind screens.
So if your favourite songs include Rhythm of Life or If My Friends Could See Me Now go out to Queanbeyan and enjoy.
