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The Black and White Ball

Published Wednesday 9 April 2008 at 15:40 by Mark Shenton

London’s most venerable pub theatre, the King’s Head, is taking a giant step forward to become a full-time producing house once again, which coincidentally means the number of producers on the billing page could fill two rows of the new bench seating that faces the stage at last.

There are also smartly refurbished loos, but while the air is fresher down there now, the opening show keeps it stale and recycled in the theatre itself.

If the King’s Head laudably wanted to usher in their new age by throwing a celebratory ball, the world premiere of “the new Cole Porter musical” - as The Black and White Ball is curiously billed - stubbornly fails to give much cause for celebration.

At first it looks like Warner Brown’s book might take this Porter anthology in an interesting direction - we’re in a once-celebrated ballroom on the eve of its demolition, which suggests echoes of Sondheim’s Follies, as the past is brought back to life and characters confront their younger selves. But then it veers uncomfortably into the realm of a thriller mystery, with some of the flavour of City of Angels and Lucky Stiff, but none of the wit or intrigue of either of them, as Kaisa Hammarlund’s Leah tries to get to the bottom of how her beloved stepfather, a celebrated writer called Jay St John (Chris Ellis-Stanton), came to be murdered in this room 20 years previously.

It turns out he was living something of a double life (as Cole Porter himself famously did), and as well as dating Katherine Kingsley’s Suzanne is also attracted to visiting a local, men-only drag club, where proceedings become La Cage Aux Folles-ish with Mark McGee’s Ron offering a manly drag version of the cancan.

But the show can’t provide enough convincing excuses to neatly fold Porter standards into the plot elsewhere, so has to frequently resort to do them presentationally, as numbers being performed by Charles Shirvell and Liza Pulman’s nightclub singers.

The cast of Matthew White’s production give vocally strong, unmiked renditions of the songs to provide some passing pleasures, but the show fatally stalls whenever they attempt to return to the plot.

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