REVIEW: Calamity Jane at the Lyceum, Sheffield
It’s not until midway through the second half that Carrie Hope Fletcher – three-time winner of Best Actress in a Musical – really gets to unholster her vocals as Calamity Jane.
Her emotion-packed delivery of Secret Love, the anthem that helped make Doris Day an icon, raises the roof off the sublime split-level saloon bar set – and proves just why she’s a star.
Fletcher plays our eponymous screwball heroine, a gun-toting tomboy who lives by her wits, plays fast and loose with the facts, and leaves a whirlwind of chaos in her wake.
The 1953 classic movie on which the show is based is clearly much-loved – there’s an impromptu audience singalong even before the curtain goes up – and this new touring revival is faithful to its nostalgic roots.
It’s a tot of Jack Daniel’s on a chilly night, a comfortingly old fashioned show, and the Wild West staging is period perfect, cosy and warm, amber like candlelight through a glass of bourbon.
The songs – familiar numbers even if you aren’t au fait with the film: Just Blew in from the Windy City, Deadwood Stage (Whip Crack Away), Black Hills of Dakota – come thick and fast.
Barely before the characters have exchanged dialogue there’s another song to move the story along: Calamity, full of tall tales of derring do, is tasked with bringing famous actress Adelaid Adams back to the Golden Garter Theatre of Deadwood – “a new gold rush town out in the Black Hills”.
Beneath all the madcap misunderstandings, this is a romcom, and Vinny Coyle plays Wild Bill Hickok with a sexy smoulder.
Hollie Cassar and Samuel Holmes make an adorable couple as Susan and Francis, Seren Sandham-Davies is vivacious as Calamity’s sidekick Katie Brown, and Molly-Grace Cutler – incredible as Carole King in the musical Beautiful two years ago – is ruefully underused as Adelaid Adams, on stage for 10 minutes and only one song.
The staging, by set and costume designer Matthew Wright, includes some lovely frontier-era touches. Ropes are slung around rickety stairs to the upper level of the saloon, festooned with red, white and blue rosettes.
Wooden chairs and trunks, pipe smoke and parasols, and comical coconut hoof clackers stand in for stagecoach rides and train journeys.
Fletcher is supported by a talented toe-tapping ensemble who double as the musicians, playing the fiddle, banjo, trumpet, harmonica, piano, double bass and penny whistle, and lead the cast in a joyous hoedown finale.
She’s feisty, funny and fierce, and clearly intended to be a thoroughly modern heroine, but there are few attempts to redress the fiction, and it is new song Careless with the Truth that actually sums up the legend of Calamity.
For all her trailblazing reputation and refusal to conform to genders norms, Martha Jane Canary was a chaotic alcoholic, dead at 47, who worked in a brothel when she wasn’t rough-sleeping her way round the Old Country, and there’s little to challenge the stereotypes from the Doris Day movie either.
“Why can’t I wear clothes that make me feel comfortable? Why are you always commenting on what I’m wearing?” asks Calam, yet she still gives in to a flouncy silk dress in the end.
It’s a pity when she gets married it’s not in a rhinestone deerhide trouser suit, whisky in hand, better still to Katie Brown.
- Calamity Jane is at the Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday, June 14.