A Face in the Crowd, Young Vic review - lame rehash of a 1950s film satire

It’s hard to work out why Kwame-Kwei Armah chose to end his tenure at the Young Vic by directing this soggy musical by Elvis Costello (songs/lyrics) and the American playwright Sarah Ruhl (book). 

Was it because of it seemed to be a warning about the dangers of populism? Such warnings are always welcome, but this isn’t the piece to do that. In its original form it was a punchy Elia Kazan film that in 1957 launched the career of future sitcom star, Andy Griffith. HIs TV show was a byword for down-home values and folksy wisdom, but In Kazan’s film he had played an Arkansas drifter, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, selling a more potent kind of cracker-barrel wisdom, which he exploits to gain fame, wealth and undue influence.

The film, according to some who have seen it recently, triggers comparisons with Trump and his vice-presidential running-mate. The musical, though, despite efforts to do the same – Lonesome goes around yelling “You’re fired!” a lot – ends up a mushy wade through a reverse-Pygmalion narrative: girl meets boy, makes him rich and famous and finally walks away after personally bringing his disgraceful self-seeking career to an end. It features a Senator who starts wearing fringed jackets and toting a rifle to deliver campaign speeches and talks of Rhodes running for VP with him, as well as a General keen to boost his career. But these are cookie-cutter characters, only seeming to have flesh on their bones thanks to the stalwart multitasking actors portraying them.

Anoushka Lucas (pictured right), star of the recent Oklahoma!, does her darnedest to animate Marcia Jeffries, a level-headed but ambitious local radio presenter who is keen to feature “real people” on her show and lands on Lonesome in the town jail. She gives this career woman a sharp tongue and savvy  outlook, with an edge of sass. Lonesome’s appeal for her, though, is based in a kind of naivety, which Lucas taps into well. She sings her heart out, too, but alas, the songs are mostly unmemorable, barring the passionate bluesy solo she gets in the second half, “I Am No Man’s Woman”.

Costello’s musical palate runs the gamut of popular styles from A to B: a bit of honky-tonk here, some country crooning there, all a bit ho-hum. There’s nothing obviously aiming at pastiche, or some kind of firmness of stylistic grip, to beef up the satire, unless you include a trio of women in sickly-coloured outfits who pop up to do close-harmony jingles, the Andrews Sisters of Ajax ads (Vicki Lee Taylor, Sadie-Jean Shirley and Emily Florence, pictured below). They swell the ranks of the chorus for the only songs with any heft, such as the anthemic “A Face in the Crowd”, which is reprised to close the piece. But this lack of distinctive material is disturbing, coming from the songwriter who penned “Oliver’s Army” and “Shipbuilding”.  

Ramin Karimloo, star of many a West End and Broadway hit musical, adds his strong voice to the mix, but doesn’t get to use it in a really juicy number. HIs best moments come when he starts to reveal the ugly racism behind Lonesome’s philosophy, laid out in a song about “blood and hot sauce” that praises barbecue over chow mein and pastrami on rye, “Know what I’m saying?” As his audience grows, he noses out how to exploit their prejudices for his own gain; from initially calling on women not to put with ungrateful men, he comes close to eulogising Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Is there in this volte-face perhaps a hint of JD Vance opportunism, seen after the fact? 

Lonesome’s rise, watched with scepticism and dismay by Marcia, is marked by the increasingly sparkly gaudiness of his wardrobe, especially after television signs him up. The ugliness of the costuming throughout is outweighed, thankfully, by Anna Fleischle’s cheekily retro set, with its sunburst motifs and chrome floor-mikes. 

But the satire onstage is lame, its targets too obvious, the dialogue ditto. In the hands of a director like Kazan, launching his film at the height of the Eisenhower era, its warnings of the dire impact of the burgeoning media, especially as a vehicle for politics, must have been incendiary. These are accepted truisms now, though; only social media has since taken the mainstream by surprise. 

Instead the script settles for borrowed apercus such as Babe Ruth’s comment about nice guys, and sentiments that could have jumped from a greetings card. Only Mel Miller (Olly Dobson), a former colleague of Marcia’s in New York, is given really cutting things to say about the showbiz-smitten Lonesome, about real poverty and real corruption. Naturally, he writes a book about it.

Even the show’s faux version of cowboy American life is delivered shakily. The West seems to be a geographically unspecific territory, which is fair enough: Marlboro cigarettes have made squillions from universalising the cowboy. But is the production deliberately making errors, to expose the phoniness of this kind of Americana – for example, the painted backdrop proudly emblazoned with the word “TEXAS”, alongside a landscape of mesas and buttes that, the last time I looked, was in Utah – or just making errors?

One of the cringiest moments comes during the baton-twirling competition, where Lonesome, there to judge the Miss Hot Springs contest, meets Betty Lou Fleckum (Emily Florence), a young woman just as grasping as him. Why write and include this scene unless you know you have practised baton-twirlers to call on? The Ajax Sisters valiantly stand in for the wannabe majorettes, but their skills are understandably minimal. 

An interesting incident the night I saw the show indicated that perhaps the Young Vic audience was way ahead of the script. In the section where Lonesome is coaching the Senator in how to present himself on the stump, he learns that “Curly”, as he has nicknamed the hapless politician, has a much loved Siamese cat. “Nah, get rid of the cat, get a dog!” urges Lonesome. At which point somebody in the audience laughed long and loud at this Vance-ist sentence, Karimloo started corpsing and all in the room joined in. It was the most genuinely amusing moment of the evening.

• A Face in the Crowd at the Young Vic until 9 November
•  More theatre reviews on theartsdesk