The Boyfriend

Published Friday 21 July 2006 at 15:50 by Susan Elkin

If there were smile factor awards for shows this flawless production would get five stars - or maybe six or seven. From the moment you see the pastel meringue set with its Riviera sandcastles and hear Claire Carrie’s warmly comic hammed-up French accent as Hortense on the phone you know you are in for a treat. It is pastiche played with panache.

Poor-little-rich-girl, Polly Browne (Rachel Jerram) is at finishing school near Nice run by the velvety Madame Dubonnet (Anna Nicholas). Of course Polly and her friends want boyfriends - in the innocent old fashioned sense. After two hours of striped blazers, boaters, tap dances, pretty frocks with matching shoes, impeccably sung tuneful love songs, a few tears, much comedy and lots of words like “chums” the piece reaches its predictable happy-ever-after conclusion.

It is difficult to pick high spots, but Ian Talbot’s flirty scene with the talented Selina Chilton is hilarious. Can this really be the first time Talbot has both directed and appeared in a production as he claims in the programme?

Summer Strallen makes a splendid job of the slightly clumsy, naive but feisty Maisie. She is also the finest dancer I have seem in a musical for a long time. Then there is the nicely observed portrait of a diffident, ill-at-ease English gent that Stephen Pacey makes of Polly’s millionaire father and the strident Lady Bracknell-esque Lady Brockhurst (Jennifer Piercey) trying to call her susceptible husband to heel.

On press night the elderly Sandy Wilson took the stage at the end to a standing ovation. He called Rachel Jerram - whose stunning singing voice and wide-eyed innocence had charmed everyone in the house - out of the line and told the surprised audience that this is her first job. “It won’t be her last” he twinkled. And he is right.