It’s a recurring theme here to note just how swamped with openings we occasionally become - just three Mondays ago I came back from New York to the prospect of three clashing first nights on that same night, while the next night had two, as I reported here. At least it meant that I was spared having to see Dickens Unplugged (which is officially unplugged tomorrow); but if only we could have been spared All Bob’s Women, too.
However, that has managed to arrive in a week when we have been having trouble filling our critical dance cards; and so it is that some of us have been lured to the Arts yet again, even though it is fast turning into a venue where a sense of doom envelops you the moment you walk in.
That’s because a sense memory has started to attach itself to a place which has recently only seen terrible shows.
As I wrote in my review on this site, “it maintains this venue’s currently unassailable reputation for hosting total duds, following in the ignoble footsteps of The Viewing Room and Haunted”.
But at least I went to a preview last Saturday, before the schedule changed on Wednesday with All Bob’s Women bumped to a 9.30pm start, to follow the import of The Two and Only from Broadway; while I can only applaud the management for doubling their rental income, it has clearly created a major nightmare and got things off to a bad start for one influential critic. The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer went on Wednesday, and as he reports in his review today, “I rocked up in good time for the advertised kick-off at 9.30pm only to discover the show was starting 45 minutes late because of technical problems. A cup of coffee, then? ‘We’ve turned off the machine,’ the barwoman announced proudly. Trembling with fury, I then managed to drop my programme in the lavatory before discovering that my seat was behind a pillar. Unfortunately, there were plenty of other seats in the sparse house offering an unrestricted view. I’d have had a better time behind the pillar.”
At least Charlie had a programme to drop down the loo (what was he doing with it at the time?); there were none available yet last Saturday. But this is also one of those rare examples of a show that has achieved the complete critical consensus of being a show we all want to flush down the toilet: as Charlie also wrote, “It is now 12 hours since I emerged, traumatised and incredulous, from this dismal farce of a musical. I have been racking my brains trying to remember a worse night in the theatre, but nothing comes to mind. Which Witch? The Man in The Iron Mask? Bernadette? All unfairly traduced masterpieces in comparison with this rancid bilge-water.”
In Metro, Robert Shore draws comparison with a show he didn’t see - Mike Read’s “notoriously awful Oscar Wilde musical, which was so bad that it closed on its opening night in 2004” - and then suggests, “But no matter how rotten it was, it can hardly have been worse than Romy Padovano’s allegedly ‘sexy new musical comedy’ All Bob’s Women”. In the Evening Standard, Fiona Mountford’s review (which only appeared in the first edition of the paper and was pulled from later ones) begins, “Sometimes, you have to worry about the sanity of theatre folk. How anyone thought it was a bright idea to stage this lamentable excuse for a musical for a two-month West End run and charge punters £29.50 for the privilege is quite beyond me.”
As Roger Foss suggests in his review on Whatsonstage, “Some musicals are so bad, they ought to have an Asbo slapped on them, with a condition they aren’t allowed anywhere near a West End theatre until the author has done six months hard labour at a writer’s boot camp.”
It is actually rather amazing that a show like this ever got out of the starting gate, let alone dared to bring the curtain up on the sorry mess that has resulted; but at least it has established a new benchmark for awfulness to be judged against. But it’s a crying shame that so much critical ink is being spilt on it, when other shows are crying to be reviewed. A fringe producer, who has a new play on at a London pub theatre at the moment, recently asked me how she could manage her PR campaign better in future: she had not managed to get a single national reviewer in. Part of the problem, of course, is the unknown: a new play by an unknown author and no track record on the part of the production company, either, means it would be a total punt in the dark for us to devote a night to it. (She also hadn’t used a professional PR to nag us to come, which though not infallible, either, can help to draw critics).
But if some shows fall off the critical radar, others like All Bob’s Women are brutally exposed. It seems that it may now live on in our memories for all the wrong reasons; but Charlie Spencer suggests that the actors erase it from theirs. He mentions the presence in the cast of Amy Booth-Steel, one of the rejected Nancy’s from “I’d Do Anything”, and says, “After her failure on the BBC talent show and now this humiliation by cruel and unusual farce, one’s heart goes out to a woman who has suffered more than enough for her art. I’ll spare the blushes of the rest of the company, and merely offer the friendly advice that they should obliterate this abysmal show from both their CVs and their memories.”
My review of All Bob's Women may possibly appear tomorrow (Saturday), which I'm told is now to be the show's last day. Good. Robert Shore had the best seat in the house: directly behind tall, wide me. Unfortunately, I could do little to block out the sound for him. Afterwards, I meant to suggest to Robert and Fiona Mountford that we drew straws and the loser had to give it as much as one star in review.
The Oscar Wilde musical was sensational in its incompetence, this was unremittingly drab in its. It was frequently incomprehensible, but never led you to summon up enough interest or energy to scratch your head at it. I know Charlie Spencer is quite glad to have added it to his collection of "stinkeroos", but the likes of The Fields Of Ambrosia and Moby! had distinguishing features to make their failures memorable; All Bob's Women is headed straight for oblivion, and rightly so.
Nope, it didn't appear... so what the hell, here's what I filed with the FT:
ALL BOB’S WOMEN
Arts Theatre, London WC2
* [ONE STAR]
Sometimes one’s response to a show can go far beyond mere dislike, to the point of fury that it ever got to see the light of a stage. I managed to cram the major indictments of All Bob’s Women into the 160 characters of a text message: “1) It’s at the Arts. 2) and 3) It’s an Italian musical 4) about a five-timing man, and 5) it thinks it can do it all in 70 minutes; 6) it can’t.” Given more space, I would have added that the cast include 7) an alumna of TV prison drama Bad Girls and 8) one of the Nancys from small-screen talent-search I’d Do Anything (on the basis of this show, yes, she certainly would), and that 9) it’s the kind of production where the offstage team get their biographies in the programme ahead of any of the performing “talent”, and the producers even give themselves a picture.
Now, none of these things is damning in itself, but when so many of them come together they amount to a strong circumstantial case, especially when found looming over a mangled corpse of a show like Michael W Kelly’s adaptation of Romy Padovano’s musical. Looked at from another angle, its brevity is a positive mercy; but really, trying to fit in Bob/Rob/Ronnie/Roger/etc’s seduction and bedding of five women of radically different character, to sketch him and them out and find space for musing as well as his come-uppance in less than an hour and a quarter is ludicrous. Matters seldom even attain the depth of a comedy sketch. And that’s without even considering the musical numbers, because they simply aren’t worth considering (except to note the similarity of one to Diana Ross’s hit “I’m Still Waiting”) even when they can be made out; on press night, the actors were over-miked when speaking and WAY over-miked when singing. (The Arts only seats around 350 people.)
I simply can’t see what it’s FOR. It works neither as clever fun nor as mindless fun; its observations on the sexes are pitched at the level of the stereotypical Italian man, and consequently far below almost any real person, Italian or otherwise. In the opening minutes, Bob delivers an incomprehensible fable beginning, “Madness wanted to play a game...” Well, Critical Tolerance pelted out the door and didn’t stop running.
I saw this show on opening night as a +1 and was equally flumuxed as to the producer's photo in the programme on the top of the page and way before the cast as mentioned by Ian shuttleworth. I've never seen this in any programme before, and one can't help thinking desperation and greed were the main factors in their producing this musical aka the Guido Fabris and Caroline Khouri show. Not mentioned above, however, was the even more 'incredible' big screen in the theatre foyer on opening night which was playing - on loop - footage of the producers themselves talking into mics during an apparent interview. What they had to say clearly didn't matter as the audience were provided only with visuals of their faces talking and no sound whatsoever. Exactly what was being marketed here??? Newbie rookie ego-inflated (clearly for no apparent reason) 'producers' or a musical?? This was riling to say the least, and one can't help think they were clearly biting off more than they could chew and it has now been dutifully laid out for them. With 'management' like this, how could anything else go right? The above comment states "I simply can't see what it's FOR", but I think all the clues needed to answer that question were right there in front of us. Is it a coincidence that the ill-fated producer's name is Guido, and one of Bob's conquests in the musical utters the same name during the play. In light of the evidence on the night, I have to concede, no.
I would just like to say that I've worked with Guido and Caroline before , I know a lot about their experience in this production and i think the personal attacks are very unfair. It was the first show they'd ever produced and i think they did it a great job to actually put it up and get that far considering all the obstacles.
I was at press night and the tv screen was showing footage of the whole press conference, it was a video of the 2 actresses singing their songs and then the interviews with the writer, the producers and the actors so you must have just caught one snippet of it.
The script adaptor was the one who added Guido's name to the script by the way.
I can't believe you would say that they were driven by desperation or greed! Who are you to judge when you don't even know them? They knew that there was no money to be made and they did it because they were asked to produce a play and put it up which is what they did. Don't throw out personal attacks on things you have no idea about, if you do know them on the other hand it sounds like you're a very bitter person.
I think they are very brave, yes ambitious but very hard working and down to earth people who love what they do and who should be applauded for having the guts to do something like this .