Gil Hates Everything

h god, I oughtn’t to like this…

This is by Leslie Bricusse, who brought us “Pickwick”, “Stop The World – I Want To Get Off” (I strongly anti-recommend that show), songs from “Doctor Doolittle” (which are awesome btw, you totally need to watch that film if you haven’t seen it), and lyrics for hire, including “Jekyll & Hyde” (oh dear, that means he wrote that line “and the front bit – is called the facade”). It dates from 1988 and has only had limited exposure… bizarrely, it opened in Exeter, and then moved to London for three months. Not a hit, then. And don’t confuse this show with “Baker Street”, an earlier show with, randomly, some songs by Bock and Harnick…

I can’t find much information about the plot, but it’s set after Holmes’ return from the dead (oops, spoilers) and features the return of Moriarty, with the addition of his daughter, to fuck with Holmes’ day, poise, and emotions.

This show will certainly remind you of “Pickwick” and “Doctor Doolittle”; Holmes himself could easily have been sung by Rex Harrison, and the opening number is a jolly knees-up introducing us to the man himself, for the benefit of all those theatre-goers who have never heard of him. (Although to be fair it gets reprised later after a plot twist makes Holmes seem like a villain.)

Bricusse is a very competent lyricist and character guy, and he’s pitched this show correctly; it doesn’t aspire to being Great Art or About Something; it’s the Sherlock Holmes musical everyone would expect to see, so it doesn’t drastically reinvent anything or turn Holmes into a radically different character, and with his pedigree, Bricusse is the right man to tackle the task he sets himself.

… OK, OK, I admit it, I really wanted to like this, and I’m cutting it a lot of slack as a result. There are plenty of “bah, whatever” songs throughout, but near the start, “Without Him There Can Be No Me” is good, with Watson listing Holmes’ cases and Holmes dismissing them in rhyme, before discussing his feeling of emptiness in the absence of Moriarty. And there’s some amusing local colour – you wouldn’t expect Bricusse to fuck up a song called “London Is London”, within his limits. And Holmes’s attempts to maintain a sterile emotional life and look down his nose upon women mean that Bricusse can write him as a version of Henry Higgins, giving him a few song concepts for free, such as “Men Like You”, a fairly robust battle of the sexes, and “No Reason”, a neat and (for Bricusse) subtle piece of introspection about romance. Near the end Holmes has “My Incomparable Best” which is alright.

Amongst the filler, there are some complete misfires, which boil down to how much local colour you can stomach, such as “A Lousy Life” adds some tragic-cockney background to Mrs Hudson which we really didn’t need and which seems to go on for fucking ever. And, dear god, there is actually a song called “Down The Apples ‘n’ Pears”, which is all about explaining Cockney rhyming slang to us. Dear god. It’s been said that the reason the Holmes stories have lasted when most of his contemporaries are forgotten is that Conan Doyle captured Victorian London as a memorable supporting character, but much of that character in the stories is presented with an emphasis on the complex, brutal, poverty-stricken, victimizing atmosphere, whereas in this show, there’s a lot of familiarly bouncy “Oliver!”-style romping. It’s a problem that English musicals clearly haven’t solved as yet, and it’s irritating and a little saddening that popular composers, at least, feel that there’s no other approach worth taking (and that it took a bloody Yank to try a different tack in “Sweeney Todd”).

The music is professional and does what Bricusse wants, even if it’s not memorable; you wouldn’t leave the theatre humming many of these tunes, but they would wash pleasantly over you while you were in there. And the overall effect is of a show that you’d take your (English) parents to, or go to yourself if you were a Holmes completist. But you should be warned, it doesn’t set the bar very high, and it still leaves it wobbling.

So Random Panda is going to be objective about this and award it the four out of ten pieces of bamboo it really deserves, although subjectively I’d probably give it a six. And I’d go see it ;-)

Here’s “Without Him There Can Be No Me” from the soundtrack, and from there you can easily find some other songs from the show.

(originally posted 2010)