By Fanny Charles
YOU won’t see a finer performance in a musical this year than Tracie Bennett in the title role of Mame, in the Hope Mill production at Salisbury Playhouse until January 24.
Tracie, who played Carlotta in the National Theatre’s brilliant production of Follies, brought the house down with her performance of I’m Still Here. It’s good to see her in a leading role, playing the extravagant, free-spirited, generous and irresistible Mame Dennis.
For someone so tiny, she has a powerful stage presence and an astonishingly big voice. She needs both for Mame, and, in the words of the title song, she really does coax the blues right out of the horn and charm the husk right off of the corn.
Set in New York in the Jazz Age, before and after the Wall Street Crash, Mame is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Patrick Dennis (the name of Mame’s orphaned nephew, and the pseudonym of the writer Edward Everett Tanner III.)
Manhattan socialite Mame Dennis is renowned for her lavish parties with friends, including her best friend, Broadway star Vera (the wonderful Harriet Thorpe), black jazz musicians, Jewish writers and the odd waif and stray. She takes in her late brother’s orphaned little boy, Patrick, and, ignoring the disapproval and meddling of banker Babcock (Hugh Osborne), who manages Patrick’s trust fund, she introduces the boy to her bohemian life.
Just when things look really disastrous, in the wake of the financial crash, she meets southern plantation owner and millionaire Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside (Darren Day).
The essence of Mame – which makes it relevant today – is the clash between high spirits, open-minded generosity and tolerance and American conservativism, with the narrow bigotry that you might think reflects the puritanism of the Founding Fathers.
When Mame meets Patrick’s fiancee and future in-laws (Mark Faith, Pippa Winslow and Grace Chapman), she meets the other side of affluent America. The tension between her free-wheeling Manhattan life and their buttoned up, “restricted’ community drives the second act.
Choreographer and director Nick Winston has created a show which, with its music, dancing, lighting and gorgeous costumes, vividly evokes the energy, style and sheer panache of New York in the Jazz Age. The versatile cast plays everything from Mame’s friends to ordinary New Yorkers and hunting-mad southerners.
The part of young Patrick is shared by three exceptionally talented boys – Harry Cross, Lochlan White and Isaac Lancel-Washington.
The 2019 Hope Mill production, at Manchester’s award-winning theatre, was the first British professional staging of the Jerry Herman show in 50 years. Now on a short tour, it is at Salisbury this week, following a week at the Royal and Derngate at Northampton. The big question is – why isn’t this show heading for the West End?
Mame (Tracie Bennett, right) and Vera (Harriet Thorpe) singing Busom Buddies. Photographs by Pamela Raith.
Male with the ensemble.