The Grand Tour, Finborough Theatre
Everything about this little-known and largely forgotten show – including the title – suggests epic. Multiple locations, ambitious concept, big ideas. But like so much of Jerry Herman’s work – and the received wisdom on it is invariably so wide of the mark – The Grand Tour is a chamber piece at heart. Adapted from the play “Jacobowsky and the Colonel” by Franz Werfel it focuses on a Polish jew, Jacobowksy, and an anti-Semitic Polish Colonel, Stjerbinsky, thrown together in a desperate flight across France from the fast advancing Nazi tsunami. Their eventual bonding – brought about by the selfless wisdom of Jacobowsky, the little man with the big heart – is something that Herman and his book writers, Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, could and would strongly relate to. For Herman it was another chance to write his aspirational Jewish musical: his first had been Milk and Honey in 1960; The Grand Tour made Broadway in 1979, with Joel Grey in the role of Jacobowsky, and was short-lived. It didn’t help that Sweeney Todd opened in the same season.
And maybe this is where the misconceptions about Herman were thrown into even higher relief. He’s always been dubbed the “showman” – the “old Broadway” glitz monger with his marching songs and big walk-down numbers. But in the sometimes painful honesty of his ballads there is real craft and sophistication at work (though never artful which is what Sondheim always is) and in a score like The Grand Tour one is reminded how all the catchy Hermanisms are closer to the popular music of Eastern Europe than Tin Pan Alley. Part of the charm of this score is that these tunes naturally have nostalgia written into them. Ok, so there are some very hokey lyrics alongside the home truths, but a little miracle of memorable simplicity like “Marianne” (a song given a conspicuous afterlife by Michael Feinstein) comes from the musical imagination of a very gifted melodist. Then there is the way he places that alongside Marianne’s “I Belong Here” – songs of loving and belonging back-to back. And the wistful wit of “Mrs Jacobowsky” which is a cracking number by anybody’s standards.
Jacobowsky’s mantra “There are times when in order to advance you have to retreat” – and Alastair Brookshaw plays the role with wonderful engagement and truth – is the form of a show where every character and every scene is barely one step ahead of the advancing (but, other than one SS Captain, unseen) Nazis. On the tiny postage stamp stage of the Finborough Theatre Thom Southerland and his designer Phil Lindley use their ingenuity to open up little windows and doors from the fabric of a map of Europe relocating us by suggestion whilst using sound to establish the proximity of the advancing aggressors. There’s a train journey where the scenery is literally passed hand to hand; there’s the somewhat clunky metaphor of the circus which the writers use to headline the notion of doing “One Extraordinary Thing” (Broadway’s recent Pippin revival seems to have followed suit) and, of course, there are nuns – The Sound of Music ensured that it was open season for them in all subsequent musicals involving Nazis.
But for all the cracks and creaks in the fabric of this show, the darkness is still there to envelope us and that final scene between Alastair Brookshaw’s Jacobowsky and Nic Kyle’s unflinching Colonel does get to one. “You, I Like” is the simple sentiment of the song but through it and the dialogue that follows we feel Jacobowski’s eternal solitude. The wandering Jew, the outsider, always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One for the collectors.
