Pack Up Your Troubles

Pack Up Your Troubles was a Music Hall variety show created in three acts (which were interspersed by the serving of an excellent meal, with the cast doubling as waiters and waitresses).  The first and third acts followed the same structure, a mixture of sketches and musical numbers (plus, in the first act, an award for the best hat in the audience), bookended with themed medleys of familiar period songs from the whole company (and with the participation of the audience).  There was good choreography at work in the medleys, with the cast moving smoothly through and between the various songs.  Alastair Hume played the piano with great gusto, throwing in the occasional impressive glissando without missing a beat.  Amongst the solo songs, there were a couple I hadn’t come across before: “Under the Bed” done in the first act by Joanne Mansfield and, in the second act, “He left me”, sung by Joanna Welsh (the précis: he left me for my granny!)  There was some fine tap-dancing to Alexander’s Ragtime Band from Joanne Mansfield and Sally Crumpler, and then Margaret Coltman and Dennis Osment sang the Barcarolle ("Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour") from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman.  I really liked the way this was done.  The duet was sung as a serious concert piece, but meanwhile, the singers where engaged in an increasingly vigorous tussle for the limelight.

The second act was entirely devoted to the melodrama “Curses, Foiled Again”.  This might have been derailed by the absence (through sickness) of Martin Mansfield, who was due to play the villain.  Music Hall Chairman, Ian Dupoy stepped into the breach, working from the script, but since the conceit of the piece was that it was the final dress rehearsal for a company performing a melodrama, this didn’t matter a bit, and the whole thing was carried off with great aplomb.  Of course, this was a modern send-up of Victorian melodrama; originally, such things would have been taken a lot more seriously.  Consequently, the exaggerated tropes were taken to extreme - including the prolonged death of the cook, the heroic poses of the youthful hero (played by the youthful Dennis Osment), and the size of the beard adopted by the villain when he disguised himself as an aged retainer - even outdoing the whiskers Les Del Nevo donned for his feature piece in the nautical medley, “Captain Ginger”.

© NODA CIO. All rights reserved.