It’s sentimental, it’s a journey, it’s the story of Doris Day’s life. While you can’t accuse this musical of not doing what it says on the tin, it does toe a slightly uneasy line between gleefully old-fashioned camp and serious musing on what emerges as a remarkably sad life story.On the one hand, we have pastel-coloured 1950s telephones that materialize from the wing on hands instead of tables, outrageously fake plastic cheeseburgers (how difficult is it to buy some buns every night?) and middle-aged actors playing backing singers dressed as babies, oversized bonnets and all. Half self-aware silliness, half plain shoddiness. On the other hand, we observe Doris repeatedly abused physically, verbally and mentally by a trail of nightmare husbands, and the meeting between a grown-up Doris and her long-estranged father is surprisingly sincere. ‘It’s been a long, long time’ rang with truth - the Calamity Jane scene was all thigh-slapping good fun.Part of this mismatching in tone is just the nature of the beast. Doris’s virginal blonde hairdo bobbing about to her easy-listening tunes is an image that the musical never quite overwrites, despite Doris’s own protestations that she is not the sweet and innocent all-American girl the studios made her out to be. Although I felt that more could have been done to give Doris a full multi-dimensionality in the face of her sufferings, ultimately neither the script nor the songs leave room for this.Nonetheless, leaving aside the incredibly messy set changes which rather set my teeth on edge, it all worked out to be a pretty entertaining hour and a half. The whoops of those around me were evidence enough that this kind of thing is many people’s cup of tea. Just don’t expect any more profundity than ‘Que Sera Sera’.
