High Society, Old Vic

It took 30 years for High Society to make its laborious transition from screen to stage. There are good reasons for that. The indelible  impression left by the movie and its star Grace Kelly was undoubtedly the biggest of them and before that, of course, there was the play – The Philadelphia Story – and the equally indelible movie made of that. Along the way the stage version – with a new book by Arthur Kopit – added a host of unrelated Cole Porter songs to the half-dozen or so in the movie drawing from other Porter musicals like Can-Can and Jubilee and even daring to steal two of the hit numbers from the former. That’s like robbing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel to improve Pipe Dream. So in musical terms the stage version is a mess with odd juxtapositioning of songs and laboured cues which appear to be there for no other reason than to bolster up and pad out Kopit’s long-winded book.

And so the question arises: why do High Society – the stage musical – at all? Well, I guess because the movie has universal recognition and commercially speaking at least that’s a head-start for the show – though having said that the last revival in London was execrable and lasted five minutes. Maria Friedman’s feisty new in-the-round staging at the Old Vic is in a differently league, it has to be said, and her realisation that the book needs classy actors who can give it life and momentum has made for some shrewd, sometimes risky, casting decisions. Kate Fleetwood’s Tracy Lord has to fight the image (and beauty) of Grace Kelly from the off, and that’s a big ask, living the part and confounding people’s expectations at one and the same time – though by act two I for one was really buying into her quirky look and edgy “entitlement” and enjoying the tension deriving from the fact that she was disguising her feelings far better than Grace Kelly ever could. Closer, in fact, to Katherine Hepburn in the film of the play.

Friedman’s whole staging is a kind of party to which we are all invited. The champagne is being delivered as we arrive along with food and flowers and there’s a young pianist, Joey Powell (Joe Stilgoe), limbering up for the wedding party “entertainment”. Someone starts singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” which is fair warning that it’s open season for Porter songs in this show and just when you think High Society is starting, Stilgoe asks us for “requests”. Absurd suggestions fly down from first night punters who sound like they’ve already been at the party champagne – but Stilgoe is the kind of jazz whiz who can on cue cross-fertilise Ravel’s Bolero with Gershwin’s Summertime and Mancini’s Pink Panther. So one suspects that this pre-show show is designed to lift our spirits and lubricate our good will in anticipation of what will always feel like a long first act. There’s so much exposition in this show and Kopit’s book which takes an age to get up to speed is no match for Porter’s wit. “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” lifts proceedings off the floor with Jamie Parker’s louche, chain-smoking Mike and Annabel Scholey’s super-sharp Liz playing fast and loose among the Fabergé eggs and Giacometti sculptures.

But then Friedman and her choreographer Nathan M Wright deliver a doozy of an act two opener and suddenly the show is up and running. In Tom Pye’s design things are apt to pop up from beneath the floor but when not one but two back-to-back grand pianos provide not just the wherewithal for a duet of virtuosic pianistic pizzazz between Joe Stilgoe and music director Theo Jamieson but the surface for a high-stepping tap routine the “swelegant elegant” party goes into overdrive. It’s like we’ve been waiting for the champagne to kick in and the direction “Let’s Misbehave” to give the show momentum. What Friedman has really caught here is the swelegant elegance in meltdown as high society disintegrates into the not so sweet and lowdown.

Bottom line: the book is funnier when everyone is wrecked, and Friedman’s cast rise to it when the words aren’t coming out in the right order. There are some cracking performances making more of the piece than it deserves: Barbara Flynn’s Mother Lord is one and a real scene stealing kid sister act in Ellie Bamber’s Dinah Lord is another. Rupert Young’s Dexter Haven is refreshingly natural and undemonstrative, a really seductive leading man. And I come back to Jamie Parker’s Mike and the moment when he let’s that astonishingly versatile voice of his let rip in the reprise of “You’re Sensational”. For a moment he almost has us believing that the show is.