David Campbell & Ensemble; photo by Brian Geach
That old debate about what makes a great Australian musical is a lot more complex these days.
With the Sydney world premiere of Dream Lover, you’re looking at one of our best – even if it is the story of Bobby Darin and everyone sings and talks in broadest Manhattan.
Based on a stage play by Frank Howson and John Michael Howson, director Simon Phillips and wife, dramaturg Carolyn Burns have forged a great musical story, both flashy and tender, and ripe with sassy Sixties style and musical variety.
With familiar Broadway punctuation, we slip quickly through Bobby’s early years, the medical diagnosis that’s likely to kill him young but drives him on, his poor but happy family, his big-hearted former showbiz Mum (starring cut-through Caroline O’Connor). Soon, his hit Splish Splash and Vegas, fame and Connie Francis, Hollywood and marriage to Sandra Dee, obsessive overwork, being swindled, collapse and rebirth.
Backed by an 18 piece swing band, all packed onto Brian Thomson’s glittering showroom set, Dream Lover artfully, almost operatically, employs the songs of Darin and his contemporaries to tell his story and that of his times.
Luckily for us, Darin was a star singer and songwriter, restlessly building a huge and varied songbook – Mack the Knife, Multiplication, Peggy Sue, I’ll be There, That’s The Way Love Is, If I Were A Carpenter, Simple Songs of Freedom, and more.
Tim Chappel’s vivid period costumes are as expertly detailed as the modulated, often surprising choreography by Andrew Hallsworth. But while the set and the numbers scream Vegas, the real achievement of Phillips and his cast is to make such intimate storytelling in front of it. And there’s something Australian in that.
David Campbell, now as a mature performer, is refreshingly almost understated in the truth be brings to Darin, and can he sing! Hannah Frederickson is also real and vulnerable as tense Gidget girl, Sandra Dee. Intimate moments are played close. And Martin Crewes is feisty but unaffected as Darin’s buddy and manager.
The producers, cast and creatives may be all Australian but this drama of Darin sometimes labours its Broadway clichés as a poverty-to-fame-to-redemption tale. And while the slab of final songs threatens to overpower the story, it is in all a dream show with engaging hype and heart.
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5
Dream Lover – The Bobby Darin Musical
Lyric Theatre, Sydney
Until 27 November 2016
