Circa has another hit show suitable for the pre-Christmas season despite Michael Nicolas Williams’ gloomy title. Let me hasten to add the title is ironic and this musical revue is anything but gloomy. 

How could it not be when he has two of the funniest female comedy actors in town on stage (Emma Kinane and Lyndee-Jane Rutherford), supported by two excellent comic singing actors (Jon Pheloung, Darren Young)?

Not only did he choose the songs (mostly American from the 50s, 60s and 70s) but he also directs the singing and plays the keyboard with his usual infectious enthusiasm, and on occasion joins his fellow performers centre stage.

It has to be admitted though that he has a slightly quirky musical taste at times. He once wrote a dark comic musical (certainly not a musical comedy), Lonely Heart Killers which is based on the movie of the same name.

And though Dead Tragic is not about murder, it is a show that takes twenty-seven well-known pretty crappy songs and has fun with them by sending them up affectionately. One of the songs, the programme tells us, is a fake, a parody from a film and we are challenged to guess which one. And there’s one song they haven’t a clue what it is about but they perform it anyway.

Jon Pheloung starts the show off with a dagger in his hand in an OTT version of Tom Jones’ already way OTT Delilah. And from then on any song that even whiffs of sentimentality, teenage love, a death row, war, and motorbike gangs is fair game.

The appallingly rhymed Angelo, Teen Angel (pronounced An-GEL), and Billy don’t be a Hero, which in this version the young woman immediately finds solace when Billy ignores her warning, are typical of the songs that get the comic doing-over.

The cast take it in turns to be the lead singer and when not they are a slick backing group as they perform on Barnaby Kinane Williams’ excellent and appropriate setting of an old-fashioned record player. The audience roared its approval throughout its 95 minutes.

[Reproduced with permission of Fairfax Media]

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This must be Michael Nicholas Williams month. He has musically directed Mama Mia, currently playing at the St James (with co-MD Timothy Bridgewater in charge on the night), musically directed and programmed the keyboard for Red Riding Hood, currently gracing Circa One, and now he is live onstage as musical director, musician and sometime singer with a new production of his own conception: Dead Tragic. What’s more, Mamma Mia director Lyndee-Jane Rutherford is in the line-up too.

It is fitting we find ourselves sitting behind a row of undertakers, delighted at this opportunity to “put the fun back in funerals”. And it’s Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ that opens the show. Why not? 

The set, designed by Barnaby Kinane-Williams, represents the portable plastic record players teenagers used to take to beach parties and picnics. Its open top frames translucent curtains, the floor is a disc ready to spin, and its articulated arm is put to excellent use throughout.

As the two dozen-strong playlist rolls out – displayed in two halves like juke-box selection charts – it’s surprising to realise how familiar the often long-forgotten songs, and even ones we’ve never heard, are. We’ve hummed along with those tunes so many times … 

Even more startling is the darkness of the pop-tuned lyrics, clearly articulated by Emma Kinane, Jon Pheloung, Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, Darren Young and Williams, in their separately hued bright silk shirts tamed with tight-fitting black waistcoats and flares (designed by Maryanne Cathro): so very 60s. Each singer gets to lead more than once, playing to their undoubted strengths, and all back each other beautifully.

Rendered with great sincerity and delight, their piss-takes are subtle and all-the-funnier for it. Sublime harmonies are augmented by simple enactments wherein the pathos descends inexorably to amusing bathos by virtue of family mealtimes, selfie-taking, white canes, wheelchairs, casket-dwelling and the like.

The show recalls, for out delectations, the tragic fates of Lola at Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’, Brotherhood of Man’s ‘Angelo’, Tony Christie’s ‘Maria’ (for whom ‘I did what I did’), Paper Lace’s ‘Billy’ begged not to be a hero, Bobbie Gentry’s ode-iferous ‘Billie-Joe’, Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey’, Karen Young’s nameless ‘Nobody’s Child’, Kenny Roger’s ‘Ruby’ who is asked not to take her love to town, and Henry Gross’s dog called ‘Shannon’, amid Tom Jones’ ‘Green Green Grass of Home’ and Westlife’s version of Jaques Brel and Rod Mckuen’s ‘Seasons in the Sun’. And that’s just side one.

Johnny Preston’s ‘Running Bear’ brings them on to side two then the concept of torch song is redefined with Queen’s musically splendid but lyrically impenetrable ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Cher’s prophetic ‘Dark Lady’ sends Paul Anka’s ‘Teen Angel’ aloft before bad weather at sea provokes John D Laudermilk’s eye-watering rhymes with ‘Darling Jane’. Commemorations continue via ‘Goodbye Eddie Goodbye’ (The Juicy Fruits) and ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ (Creation) then motorbikes are lethally mixed with teenage love and freight trains, arguments and speed in ‘Black Denim Trousers and Motor Cycle Boots’ (The Cheers), ‘Terry’ (Twinkle) and ‘Leader of the Pack’ (The Shangri-Las).

But nothing is more tragically rendered than Elvis Presley’s ‘In The Ghetto’, which only leaves Maureen McGovern to lead us in her prayer of hope: ‘The Morning After’.

The undertakers are over the moon, the audience is clapping and stamping … and what, no encore? How about something from one of Circa’s memorable Paul Jenden/Gareth Farr musicals – or is there a suitable lament in Michael Nicholas Williams’ very own Lonely Heart – the musical?  

Dead Tragic is ideal end-of-year fare, bound to make you feel better about your own lot in life and send you humming into the night.

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Knifings, shootings, hangings, drownings (suicidal or accidental), being run over by a train, fatal stock car or motor bike crashes, other miscellaneous or less specified modes of untimely dying – they all seem to have had a macabre yet undeniable fascination in the realm of popular song writing and reception. Add to the mix dollops of cheesie sentimentality …

Back in 1988, Michael Williams, who figures in this new production on keyboards, together with his colleagues at Centrepoint at the time, picked the general theme up, and compiled this musical revue of snuff songs. It’s all weirdly entertaining.

The songs are nearly all American, which makes one wonder about the morbidity of Americans’ fantasy-lives, such that the daft gun-nutters of the National Rifle Association have just succeeded in winning a Supreme Court verdict to strike down any sensible local gun-control laws, that might constrain their ability to shoot dead each other, which they do all-too-often already.

The lyrics of some of the songs, such as ‘Darling Jane,’ would be well worthy of the esteemed Scottish bard William McGonagall.

An earlier production of the show in this theatre took place back in 1992, and several of the original cast are fronting up again, including Michael Williams himself on keyboards. Some songs are added, or changed.

Insofar as I can remember it well enough to make comparisons, its main tendency was to deliver appalling stories with some kind of manic, black-comic zest. This production is technically much more lavish, and sometimes the singing and immediate role-playing are relatively straight, albeit full-on, with the ironic counterpointing provided by the stage-business surrounding them.

For example, with ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,’ the singing of Jeff Kingsford-Brown as a crippled war-veteran in his wheelchair is grim and bitter enough; yet alongside him, Katherine Mitchell as Ruby is dancing away in a fashion that proclaims her flighty delight in scoring some time out from attending upon her grumpy husband. And whatever he may be presuming, from the look of things she’s heading off to nothing more promiscuous than an evening of line-dancing.

In ‘Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots,’ the ‘hot rod cycle’ gets ridden on to the stage cunningly disguised as a scooter.

Generally, the cooperation between the director, Kate Louise Elliott, and the choreographer, Ian Harman, generates a rich mix of stage business, lively and witty. Mitchell, Kingsford-Brown, Emma Kinane, and Darren Young all sing and act very well, in their many different roles, and wigs. Katherine Mitchell stands out, for the sheer quality of her voice and of her role-playings, but they are all fine.

The one number that didn’t work well on the first night was ‘Shannon,’ about a run-over family dog, as the singer, Michael Williams himself, adopted a high-pitched voice that rendered the words incomprehensible, when using his natural voice would have been fine.

Otherwise (and this one glitch is easily fixed), the show works extremely well, and offers a great night out.

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