[CABARET/Musical Theatre ~ AUS ~ SA PREMIERE]

Star Theatre Two at Star Theatres, Mon 3 Mar, 2024.

Marcel Cole is perfectly cast as British entertainer George Formby. He has a close physical resemblance and is able to totally capture Formby’s cheerful “Turned out nice again” persona, Cole leads us through an entertaining story of the life and songs of Britain’s most successful entertainer of the 1930s and 1940s.

He is joined onstage by his real life mother Katie Cole, who plays not one, not two, but three different roles with great aplomb. She is hilarious as a rather stuffy BBC newsreader – ‘Oh there appears to have been a spelling error’ she huffily retorts when reading an item about a new music group called The Beatles. Katie also plays George’s wife and ambitious manager Beryl with appropriate gusto. With a quick onstage change of wig and costume she becomes his mother. The only danger here is that at times Marcel is in danger of being overshadowed by her stage presence.

There is enough in Formby’s life story to have turned this show into a racy tell-all potboiler, but fortunately this approach has been avoided and essential information is included without being over-dramatised. We learn that George’s father was also a vaudeville performer of the same name, and that he did not want his son to follow in his footsteps. So  George Jnr became a jockey until he grew too big. When his father died suddenly he decided to ignore his father’s wishes.

Formby was also a highly paid film star making a large number of successful films. But the emphasis of the show is on Formby the ukulele and banjo-uke/banjolele playing entertainer. Some of Formby’s best known songs are lovingly performed by Cole – including When I’m Cleaning Windows and Leaning On A Lamppost. Many in the audience are singing along, replicating what must have happened with Formby’s own audiences.

In this day and age it is perhaps a little difficult to understand the mass appeal of a near illiterate man whose songs, with the help of a team of writers, are remarkable mainly for their wordplay. Being a cheeky and funny vaudeville performer meant that in grim times during the Second World War, Formby perhaps provided a sorely needed antidote.

My first thought was that the show needed a little more of a ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ approach to stress that Formby often sailed close to the wind with censorship laws – some of his songs were banned by the BBC – but such is the nature of Formby’s innuendos and double entendres that he could claim a perfect innocence, and any perceived naughtiness is in your mind, not his.

Formby’s decline was rapid. Returning from entertaining the troops overseas he found he had been replaced in the box office by matinee idols David Niven, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Olivier and the like. Suffering depression and addiction to morphine, Beryl had him committed to an insane asylum. Rather than dwell on the darker aspects of this time, it is suggested that he recovered and went on to rebuild his career, travelling to Australia and New Zealand, and that the crowds gathered at his funeral were a testament to the adoration he attracted to the very end.

Anyone with a love of nostalgia, an interest in history, or just a good singalong will find much to enjoy in this show.