A real festive mixture

“WHITE CHRISTMAS”, Lowry Lyric, by Paul Genty
“WHITE Christmas” is an entertaining, seasonal, bright, colourful, lavish post-war musical that happens to be no more than a decade old.

That is one of its strengths — and problems. It will be adored by those who like the big musicals of the Forties with their fantasy dance numbers, famous tunes and lavish sets — but will be thought trite and massively sentimental by everyone else.

The one abiding problem of this favourite movie musical-turned-stage show is that it can never hope to replicate the sentimental grandeur of the original.

Kaye and Crosby had snow, Vermont, white-picket-fence innocence and legions of troops marching around a giant stage supposedly inside a barn.

This has the same sentimental story — former soldiers, now revue stars, stage show in Vermont barn, win girls, save their old general’s hotel; similarly overblown musical numbers — and fake snow, right at the end.

Disappointingly, the big finale here has no soldierly choir, just a rather weak speech and a rendition of the title song by a cast of about two dozen, done up like a scene from a Victorian Christmas shop.

The songs are the generally indifferent (with famous exceptions) ones from the film, plus a few Berlin standards (“I Love a Piano” and “I’ve Got my Love to Keep Me Warm” among them), but they do tend to be overstretched by the (admittedly lavish) dance routines.

Cast-wise, there are few complaints: none at all about Suzanne Shaw and Rachel Stanley as the sisterly romantic interest; both bright and classy. And there is certainly no complaint about Louise Plowright, a gloriously on-form Ethel Merman soundalike as the hotel concierge.

But the two male leads, Adam Cooper and Aled Jones, are a curious mix.

Cooper is a fine, handsome modern leading man with a flair for comedy, but Jones, a little fleshy, sings with a Welsh lilt in a voice, which is clear and strong, rather than warm and cosy like Crosby’s. They work well together without actually being at all right together.

Roy Dotrice as the general is quite a bit too old and out of shape for the role, but at the opposite end of the scale, Rochdale’s little Emily Fitton as his grand-daughter (on Tuesday) was an 11-year-old knockout.

Like Christmas itself, anticipation is better than actuality, but the actuality is still pretty good.