U.K. Theater Review: ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ the Musical
If ever a show caught the national mood, it’s this — “Little England: The Musical” by another name. Adapted by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”) with a score by Georges Stiles and Anthony Drewe (who wrote new songs for the stage version of “Mary Poppins”), “The Wind in the Willows” is a quaintly old-school family entertainment — either timeless or throwback, as you prefer. Stitching Ratty and company’s riverbank capers into a string of music hall set-pieces, complete with tap-dancing shire horses and a transvestite turn by Mr. Toad, Fellowes mostly thumbs his nose at our society’s need for speed. It’s a reading that seems positively retrograde, which may hold it back in the cosmopolitan West End, where the show will play following its premiere in Plymouth. It champions preservation over progress at every turn.
However, we Brits really do love Grahame’s book. For a measure of how fondly it’s treasured, consider the fact that the members of the public invested more than £1 million in a novel crowd-capitalization scheme. The end product reflects its origins through and through. Bedecked with bunting and top-to-tails in tweed, the show couldn’t be more backwardly British if it took its tea in colonial china.
Rather than re-tune Grahame’s story for the 21st century, Fellowes follows it with absolute fidelity, not only honoring all its iconic moments but also folding its tangential tales into a neat overall narrative. The structure clearly emphasizes the clash of homely comfort and life on the road, swinging from the animals’ individual abodes — Badger’s bookish set and Mole’s messy hole — to their various modes of transport. It’s clear on which side Fellowes’ bread is buttered. An Englishman’s home is his castle, after all. Toad’s motorcar is never a mark of modernity; it’s an abomination wreaking havoc on the riverbank’s rural idyll.
In the process, however, Fellowes ends up condoning not just conservative values but old class structures too. Rufus Hound’s Toad might be a bumptious fool, forever following the latest fad, but he’s ultimately portrayed as a benign bimbo. In his queasy green fripperies, jocular even in court, he’s like a cross between Boris Johnson and Dame Edna.
Meanwhile, the woodland critters that squat in the stately Toad Hall in his absence aren’t simply carnivorous villains, but commie-sympathizing cockneys in pinstripe suits. Led by the lithe malevolence of Neil McDermott (as Chief Weasel), their numbers upend the score’s silkiness with a undercurrent of funk. As the saying doesn’t quite go: the Weasels get all the best tunes.
Mostly, Stiles and Drewe draw their inspirations from the classic British repertoire. The score — always utterly charming, never remotely stirring — rifles through references to Gilbert and Sullivan, Vera Lynn and the swing of Carnaby Street. Between them, David Birrell’s stoic Badger, Fra Free’s meek Moley and Thomas Howe’s sanguine Ratty sing the virtues of friendship, with the score pausing to pay homage to Britain’s fluctuating seasons in a set of choral hymns. Air-hostess swallows fly in for summer and field mice wassail us into winter. That nostalgia for nature finds its match in Peter McKintosh’s picturesque designs: riverbanks rustling with reeds and rushes, and cute country-life costumes that sprout ears and tails.
There’s a sweet classicism to Rachel Kavanaugh’s production, and it will doubtless work as a family treat. But the easier Grahame’s story slips down unchecked, the more audiences will swallow its unsavory, outmoded politics.
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