fri 29/03/2024

Sister Act, London Palladium | reviews, news & interviews

Sister Act, London Palladium

Sister Act, London Palladium

Whoopi dons a wimple and draws the crowds in late-summer sell-out

You can't move in London for American performers, whether it's the Yankee contingent of The Bridge Project at the Old Vic, or the presence at various addresses of Mercedes Ruehl, Jeff Goldblum, Glee star (and erstwhile Tony nominee) Jonathan Groff, and, of course, pretty well the entire cast of Hair. But incomplete though that run-down is (one mustn't forget the silvery voiced Sierra Boggess in Love Never Dies or David Hyde Pierce's stern-faced mien in La Bête), few visitors have fired up the public as has Whoopi Goldberg, at the Palladium for three weeks to boost the musical, Sister Act, on which she also gets top billing as producer. And how is the Whoopster in a wimple? The more fascinating topic is the galvanising effect that her arrival has had on the show as a whole.

In performance terms, she's fine, a bona fide star-turned-team player in order to reboot a show that will close on 30 October after 18 months without ever having quite taken London fully by storm. (Sally Dexter will take on the part in September.) A talent whose arrival on Broadway nearly 30 years ago under the auspices of Mike Nichols remains one of the fabled showbiz stories of our time, Goldberg starred in the two Sister Act movies, so she knows her way around material that is by no means deep.



But in shifting assignments from the leading role of the lounge singer on the lam on screen to the Sheila Hancock part of the don't-mess-with-me Mother Superior on stage (Maggie Smith's bailiwick in the film), Goldberg's gravelly voiced, po-faced presence has transformed the musical showcasing it. Suddenly, Sister Act is fun.

That's not to say that it wasn't before, at least in fits and starts: the score from Alan Menken is one of the multi-Oscar-winner's best, a cunning pastiche of musical styles and motifs that may amount to some of the most infectious stuff that Curtis Mayfield, Donna Summer, and Barry White, to name but a few, never actually got to sing. Early in the first act, "Fabulous Baby" takes the "I want" number - a musical theatre requirement - to a newly sequinned, giddily delusional high, while "Raise Your Voice" serves a comparable (if far jazzier) function within context to "Do-Re-Mi", another song from a recent London Palladium tenant about singing nuns.

The vocal demands for the Mother Superior herself are fairly lax, consisting essentially of a solo, "Here Within These Walls", that ('natch) gets reprised, and Goldberg growls her way through it in what is a far less demanding gig than when she replaced Nathan Lane on Broadway in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum 13 years ago.

Far more worthy of comment, beyond the self-evident drawing power of a cultural figure who seems to enjoy a mega-star status here that she hasn't ever quite evinced on Broadway, is the looser, far more ebullient feel to a piece that on press night looked as if it had been supervised by the Mother Superior, so intermittently did it let down its guard. The transformation is most directly apparent in the musical's young American lead, Patina Miller, who seems to have taken her cue from Goldberg's inimitable sass and now communicates an enjoyment in playing Deloris Van Cartier that will surely come as the real surprise to those spectators this month who have booked tickets merely to gawp at a celebrity.

There's something undeniably affecting about watching Miller share the stage with the woman who begat her part on celluloid


Possessed of abundant curls that put one in mind of an African-American Bernadette Peters, Miller seems up for infinitely many a shimmy and a shake - and a laugh - as she gets a choir of tunefully challenged nuns into the habit of singing on cue, and there's something undeniably affecting about watching her share one of London's largest stages with the woman who begat her very part on celluloid.

"We been talkin' the same talk the whole time," the Mother Superior comments to Deloris near the end, as opposites attract in accordance with the musical theatre norm. (Check out Wicked, a show whose celebration of female bonding informs Sister Act at every turn.) But with these two actresses driving the material, a once pro forma comment acquires actual emotional heft, which in turn lifts Carline Brouwer's production - former Disney exec Peter Schneider originated the show - out of the realm of mechanical cinematic retread that it inhabited first time round.

Longueurs and a more than occasional crassness remain, and Ian Lavender's role as the Monsignor seems barely to exist: at the curtain call, one could sense people asking, "Who was he?" And in design terms, Lez Brotherston's evocation of the nuns' ecclesiastical quarters sits far better on the capacious Palladium stage than the cheesy confines afforded the show's male characters, who here include Blue alumnus Simon Webbe in a rather stiff West End debut as the man with the gun who keeps Deloris on the run. (On the other hand, Ako Mitchell is now actually rather sweet, rather than cartoonish, playing Eddie, the sweaty policeman who finally gets the girl of his dreams.)

But when Protestant soul sister Deloris decides against the odds to forego Vegas in favour of life with her fellow Sisters, her decision seems absolutely right. As does that of a visiting luminary who has decided to spend her late summer in London so that her show, and its superlative leading lady, can get a very real lift.
Check out the trailer for the film version of Sister Act:


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