Camden New Journal - Classical and Jazz: Kismet

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The Review - MUSIC - classical & jazz with JOEL TAYLOR
Published: 5 July 2007

Michael Ball as Poet in Kismet

Broadway smash falls wide of mark

REVIEW: KISMET
Eno at The Coliseum
by Helen Lawrence

HOW could anyone at ENO have thought this revival of Kismet was a good idea?
Their desperation to find moneyspinners in the face of philistine government meanness to the arts is understandable.
It may have looked good in theory: a 1953 Broadway blockbuster musical, Tony award-winner in 1954, and a 1955 film starring Howard Keel and Ann Blyth.
But one look at the libretto, a pantomime send-up of life in ancient Baghdad with every imaginable stereotype and cringe-making lines including “Baghdad is the symbol of happiness on Earth,” should have set alarm bells ringing.
The book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, based on a 1911 play by Edward Knoblock, is a dated, embarrassing farrago.
The score by Robert Wright and George Forrest is a hotchpotch of music plundered from Borodin and stitched together with uninspired Broadway cliché.
Ultz’s staging manages to be both minimalist and tawdry while direction by Gary Griffin is lame.
Dance routines are ragged – choreographer Javier de Frutos walked out over “creative differences” – leaving Nikki Woollaston to finish the job.
Conductor Richard Hickox is out of his depth in the Broadway idiom.
The excellent cast deserves better.
Michael Ball and Sarah Tynan, with fine voices, winning personalities and natural comic timing, are first rate as the Poet and his daughter Marsinah. Former car-mechanic tenor, Alfie Boe, as the Caliph sings with operatic flair and burnished tone. Graeme Danby’s Wazir is a suitably scheming villain and all the supporting roles are well taken.
The only disappointment was Broadway star Faith Prince as Lalume. Her Ethel Merman vocal style was at odds with the rest of the cast and her words mostly inaudible.
’s On the Town, and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
Why not West Side Story or Showboat? Better still would have been Borodin’s fabulous, rarely performed Prince Igor from which the Kismet music is pinched.

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