If High School Musical did High Seas Musical, then you would have Dames at Sea (at the Union Theatre until 20 August). Optimistic? Check. Silly? Check. Full of Bright Young Things bursting to perform? Check. After the rambunctious scene-setting opener, "Wall Street", things seem relatively sensible (relatively - this is musical theatre) before "Choo-Choo Honeymoon" puts an end to any worries that a little laughter might be misplaced in the earnest confessions of love. Like all the best parodies, the cast are in on the joke, but give the tradition (in this case, the ludicrously over the top Depression-era Busby Berkley Hollywood song-and-dance extravaganzas) plenty of respect, enjoying the evening as much as the audience.
Ruby (Gemma Sutton) arrives from Hicksville USA and immediately falls into (i) the arms of sailor-songwriter Dick (Daniel Bartlett) and (ii) the chorus line of a Broadway show. If one romance isn't enough, chorus-girl Joan (Catriana Sandison) is simultaneously reunited with her sailor-beau Lucky (Alan Hunter) - who sings a bit himself, wouldn'tcha know? But just when things are going swell, bulldozers crash through the foyer as The Crash crashes into their lives. Can ageing diva Mona (Rosemary Ashe) take her eyes off Dick for long enough to cajole old flame Captain Courageous (Ian Mowat) to allow the troupers rescue the show by staging the show on his battleship? It's a crazy kind of a plan, but you know summink? It might just work...
The four young leads look great, deliver their preposterous lines with real conviction, and sing beautifully. The romance between the older pair is characterised by hamming to within an inch of corpsing, with the audience lapping up every second of such old-fashioned cynicism-free fun. The lovers get fine support too, from an all-singing, all-dancing set of Dames and Sailors as true love, as we all knew, wins the day.
Eight decades on from the Great Depression, there are many more ways to distract oneself as Barack Obama seeks to emulate Franklin D Roosevelt, but Dames at Sea proves that few ways of forgetting the bad news have stood the test of time as successfully as an Old Hollywood Musical.
