Kids are a funny business, aren’t they? When I went to the May 2015 opening night of Sean Holmes’s revival of Alan Parker’s classic child gangster musical, I was parent to a one-month-old; seven years later, the same production of ‘Bugsy Malone’ has been revived for a tour plus Christmas season at Ally Pally, and I took along the now seven-year-old (obviously) and his four-year-old brother.
They enjoyed it, in a slightly freaked-out way: it’s very difficult to exactly explain the concept of ‘Bugsy Malone’ in a way that makes sense to kids, partly because they don’t have much reference to the things the show is spoofing. But in short, it’s a musical about Prohibition-era gangsters mowing each other down in ’20s Chicago, only here the gangsters are all children and the guns fire goo, with the suggestion that any child ‘killed’ is merely ‘out’ in some sort of grand cosmic game. This made sense to creator Parker when it debuted in its original movie version back in 1976, and now it’s just part of our cultural fabric so we don’t argue with it (although again, you try telling that to a seven-year-old – FWIW the show is officially aimed at ages eight and above, though I was not the only parent blithely disregarding this).
I have to say that memories of 2015 slightly took the shine off it for me. Shockingly, the splurge guns are much, much less splurgy than they used to be (budget cuts? health and safety? angry dry cleaners?). It sounds glib to say, but I had really hyped these things up. And the casting is a very delicate thing to get right: Holmes’s production balances bona fide pre-teen leads with older performers to do the more co-ordinated backing dancing and singing; the young boys, in particular, have a lot on their shoulders and aren’t always the easiest to hear clearly. But Parker famously regretted dubbing adult singing voices on to his child stars, and there’s an integrity to the slight wobbliness of such young performers (even if the Lyric ones were slicker).
Yes, it’s a bit over the hill, but I think that’s partially a reflection of how difficult a show to stage it is. The late Parker wouldn’t allow productions for years because he didn’t want it to fall into cutesy cliché. Holmes won him over and largely triumphed at the Lyric, but things always slip a bit on long-running touring productions (effectively what this is), and I think you can either be sniffy about it or be pragmatic about the fact that it’s a minor miracle this show exists at all in any form. And Parker’s songs remain wonderful: there are only ten of them but they’re each perfectly formed, with at least three of them bona fide all-time classics. You give a little love and it all comes back to you – damn right.