Rock-on Essex

ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR 

(Palace. Manchester)

IF it sounds to you like this new David Essex/Jon Conway musical will be all happy Carnies cheerfully fleecing punters with their wily but charming ways, or Gypsies working out their differences “the geepsy way”, think again.

The title is quite ironic, for rarely has there been a less cheerful funfair.

Boss Levi (Essex) mourns his wife, lost tragically to the wall of death, and his son Jack (the rather too-young-looking Paul-Ryan Carberry) fancies outsider Alice (last night played by Lara Denning), whose father Harvey (David Burrows) is keen to rough him up as the price he must pay for this affront.

Meanwhile Gypsy Rosa (Louise English) endures unrequited love for Levi; her daughter Mary (Emma Thornett) likewise Jack — her feelings occasionally returned — and Harvey can’t quite decide if he’s a hard man, as his heavy sidekick Druid and team of funfair-smashing toughs would suggest, or really an old rocker who loves to reminisce about the good old days with Levi. Some odd character flaws there, perhaps.

Oh, and there’s a simpleton, Jonny (Stefan Butler), for good measure, and the funfair is going bust.

Having said that, the show is strangely cheerful in aspect, what with Essex’s best-known pop tunes cut about to fit the action and a terrific set with plenty of lights, galloping horses and even working dodgems (for “Hold Me Close”, obviously).

And even if Harvey the hard-ish man is a bit flawed, the most useful number of the night is when he and Levi and other older members of the cast sing a version of “Rock On”, like a bunch of shameless uncles at a nephew’s birthday party — the point being that Essex isn’t afraid, now he’s a white-haired, balding, bearded grandfather figure, to send himself up.

The bonhomie adds an acceptable face of entertainment to what is otherwise a bundled-up show with lurching plot, minimally-sketched characters and little in the way of anything much, except to be transport for Essex’s songs, some of them entertaining, some inoffensive.

Which is really the most you can say about it: the show is never actually bad and it at least looks and sounds good.

The evening has been put together to please the singer’s fans, but that’s hardly grounds for complaint — there are still rather a lot of them.