Elia Kazan’s cult 1957 film about a no-mark drifter-turned dangerously powerful demagogue by the power of media isn’t so much prescient as timeless – of course it has resonance in the age of Trump, but you can easily see parallels with Hitler, Rasputin, Reagan and countless more.
Adapted by US playwright Sarah Ruhl with songs by New Wave legend Elvis Costello, this musical version of ‘A Face in the Crowd’ feels like an appropriately splashy finale to Kwame Kwei-Armah’s time as artistic director of the Young Vic – this is the last show he’ll personally direct before his departure.
I wouldn’t say it doesn’t work; but I would say that it doesn’t live up to its considerable potential.
That’s not the fault of its two excellent leads, Ramin Karimloo and Anoushka Lucas. He’s a heavyweight commercial musical theatre star, who as far as I’m aware has never set foot on the stage of a subsidised theatre before this. His wallet no doubt thanks him for that, but it’s a shame because he’s excellent as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, a charming nobody whose folksy charm and empathy for regular Americans goes down a storm first on radio, then TV. He’s a great singer but Costello’s ‘50s style pop country songs are not vocally demanding compared to the types of quasi-operatic musical theatre roles that are Karinloo’s bread and butter - he’s here to act, and he does so very well, his Rhodes a beguiling mix of vulpine chancer, little boy lost and loveable everyman orator.
Star of the Young Vic’s recent ‘Oklahoma!’, Lucas initially feels stuck in the straight woman role as Marcia, the idealistic Arkansas radio producer who hits gold when she interviews a jailed Rhodes for her titular show about regular Americans. But as her fortunes skyrocket with his, she changes in more subtle ways – she becomes colder, angrier, more manipulative, confused and frustrated by her complicated feelings for Rhodes. It’s a part Lucas grows into as the show wears on, and is an appreciably more complex part than the film Marcia, who is simply straightforwardly besotted with her subject.
It’s a show of two halves. The first details Rhodes’s rise, and it’s entertaining but somewhat ponderous. Although Ruhl’s script largely mirrors the film, it leaves out details that foreshadow the path Rhodes will take – going into the interval it feels like the worst he’ll do is disappoint his fans with a bit of light philandering.
There’s therefore something whiplash inducing about the much darker second half where Rhodes is now expressing borderline fascistic views as his fan base grows larger and he hitches his wagon to (presumably Republican) presidential candidate Senator Worthington Fuller.
To some extent the point about Rhodes is that he really is just a face in the crowd, a no-one who would never have been a threat had he not been given attention. As such we’re not supposed to know much about him – indeed, all we ever learn about his past is that his supposed hometown of Rittle, Arkansas is a pure fabrication. Nonetheless, his drift into darkness feels like it could have been articulated better - there’s some suggestion that he’s simply expressing extreme right wing views because he knows Fuller’s base will lap it up, but the show never comes out and says that particularly clearly. It’s frustrating because the opacity of his motives ends up robbing him of resonance. Karimloo’s performance is great, but the character lacks context that might have given the show more impact. His film incarnation - played by Andy Griffiths - did have some skeletons in the closet; they might have helped here.
The pace isn’t necessarily helped by Costello’s songs, which are deft evocations of the popular music of the day, but don’t drive the narrative. Kwei-Armah has a slick, light touch that does help it all go down smooth, but he can’t style out the slow start and post-interval tone lurch.
It is, nonetheless, a compelling story with great lead performances, and if Rhodes could have been written at greater depth, we know the sort of figure the show means by him. Not the magnum opus it could be, maybe, but a decent swansong for Kwei-Armah.