Theatre Review: Mad About The Boys – Delighting In The Debonair, Or Triple The Tunesmiths

March 15, 2024

 

By BRUCE DENNILL

 

Mad About The Boys / Directed by Amanda Bothma / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg

 

East London-based singer and actor Daniel Anderson was introduced to Johannesburg audiences in last year’s critically lauded Vincent – a narrative musical show looking at the life of artist Vincent Van Gogh. He impressed hugely then, and does so again in a show with a similar concept but a wider scope.

Mad About The Boys is a celebration of the lives and musical legacies of Cole Porter, Ivor Novello and Noel Coward, whose collective output was a large part of the soundtrack of the years between the two world wars, and whose preferred style also helped define the slick, suave look of the time.

Playing all three men and the narrator of writer-director Amanda Bothma’s script, Anderson has a huge amount to do, including a great deal of dancing as he sings. He seamlessly connects the characters and the narrative, ensuring that it’s always clear who is speaking or performing at different stages of the story, which is more difficult than it sounds given that Novello and Coward were both English and had similar accents, and all three men – all gay – shared similar effete behaviours and perspectives on the world.

The script doesn’t delve too deeply into the hardships the men faced as homosexuals in an age when admitting such a lifestyle would have been at the very least career suicide, and possibly considerably more adversity – though it does make clear reference to the fact that they did have to adapt to people’s expectations in several ways. It also doesn’t take a very deep dive into biographical details of any of the trio, meaning that for audiences who know little more than the names of the piece’s subjects and the more famous of their songs, all the impact of the piece has to be delivered by what takes place live on stage.

Fortunately, given the prodigious skills of both Anderson and accompanist Paul Ferreira on the piano, there is more than enough on offer in this regard to provide immensely satisfying entertainment. Anderson is an actor who can vanish into his role or roles, and as a singer, he is a very special talent indeed. His voice is custom-made for material like Novello’s Keep The Home Fires Buring and We’ll Gather Lilacs; Coward’s I Went To A Marvelous Party and Mad Dogs And Englishmen; and Porter’s I Get A Kick Out Of You and Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, and with the extra touch of attention to detail he gives these songs in terms of vibrato and phrasing, he actually sounds more or less exactly like a Jazz Age vinyl record come to life.

Ferreira, as ever, is a sublime partner for such compositions, not only adding all the light and shade the composers would have wanted, but also capable of adjusting his timing and feel to how Anderson is expressing himself and delivering the music across the stage. It’s an extraordinary skill, and one Ferreira makes look entirely effortless.

This is a warm tribute to a group of artists whose work is probably still underrated, even as their songs remain in the public consciousness, but it is also a showcase the two contemporary talents on stage, whose delight in what they do is infectious.

 

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