Maybe it’s because I’m a Brightonian, but this show certainly didn’t make me love London town. Cabaret is traditionally a sexy art form, seducing its audience into the show, Loving London showed glimmers of this but it was so underdone it was more embarrassing than anything.
Being the only young – and female – audience member I did wonder if I may have accidentally stumbled into an older gentlemen’s club; one where the entertainment can’t be too exciting for fear of over exertion. The moments of audience participation did nothing to help this with the microphone being offered to us to join in with renditions of Werewolves in London and Dedicated Follower of Fashion.
Cabaret, of course, is a form of performance that thrives off its audience and so is particularly hard to pull off with only five audience members. So credit is due to Weston for trying. However, it also relies on strength of persona of which Weston didn’t have much. Some promising characters did appear and the show would have benefited from these being bigger and present for longer. London is ripe for caricature and satire and characters such as the investment banker briefly presented could really have been played with to take them to another level.
The general content of the show was a loosely strung together chain of references to London; we heard Samuel Pepys, Noel Coward, Alan Bennett and Charles Dickens – the latter of which was the only text actually learnt. For the rest of the time we were read to from books, the effect of which was of a history teacher desperately trying to make her lesson more interesting.
Weston can, thank goodness, sing and after a faulty start her vocal performances were often enjoyable. Particular stand out numbers were ‘Worst Pies in London’ from Sweeney Todd, ‘A Nightingale Sang’ and ‘Mack the Knife’. Interestingly she isn’t a bad performer and there were moments when she really came to life, they just weren’t sustained. Weston forgot her place a number of times and even had to go off stage to collect forgotten props.
It seems that Weston mainly suffered from bad direction and under-rehearsing. This made the show nothing more than amateur; often uncomfortable and more at home in the afternoon slot at an old people’s home than on any sort of stage.
