Whitelaw Savory Ethan Freeman Molly Grant Jessica Martin Taxi Black Kerry Shale Stanley Daniel Gillingwater Rodney Hatch Michael Cantwell Venus Louise Gold Mrs Moats Delianne Forget Store Manager Matthew Eames Sam Dan Callaway Mrs Kramer Myra Sands Gloria Kramer Lori Haley Fox Police lieutenant Michael Howell Rose Aileen Donohoe Zuvetli Himself (I couldn't put a name to the beard) Dr Rook Dan Bates Matron Abigail Langham Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, Central School of Ballet Director Ian Marshall Fisher Conductor/Music director Kevin Amos Music director Jason Carr One touch of Venus was the musical Weill wrote after Lady in the dark, initially again with Marlene Dietrich in mind. One touch of Venus is based on a nineteenth-century romantic fantasy novel, instead of up-to-the-minute Freudian ideas. The lyrics are by Ogden Nash, known as the doyen of light verse, not by the old Broadway hand Ira Gershwin. And the book is snappy, by S.J. Perelman, not the soggy mess that intersperses the great dream interludes of Lady in the dark. But Venus is close to Lady, not only in the way it has more or less disappeared except for a handful of very well known songs, but also in its genuine, exuberant theatrical weirdness. Both shows were made into less than wonderful films that sank most of Weill's music, but Venus, the bigger hit, became a real turkey, a love-is-in-the-air vehicle mainly for Ava Gardner's breasts, which lovely as they were were not enough to carry a movie, at least not that sort of movie. The show, of which there doesn't seem to be a recording in print, turns out to be somewhat in the spirit of Thorne Smith's Night life of the gods, with touches of Damon Runyon and Brecht. Smith was a kind of Prohibition-era Tom Holt -- he wrote the original Topper story, and the novella which became I married a witch and subsequently Bewitched. A nebbish barber, Rodney Hatch, puts his fiancee's ring on the finger of an ancient ("three-thousand-year old") Greek statue of Venus in an art gallery. (The gallery owner is an advocate of the avant garde but the statue reminds him of a lost love.) The statue comes to life and falls immediately in love with Rodney. She disappears his fiancée, a squawking shrew with a mother, and causes various mayhem by her unbridled lust for him. They end up in police cells, as in Bringing up Baby. The gallery owner, Whitelaw Savory, is a poser but less unsympathetic than his namesake in the movie: the wistful "West wind" is his song. His assistant Molly Grant, played by Eve Arden in the movie, is ruder and even funnier in the show, and not in love with him. A decidedly Marxian pair of private detectives, Taxi Black and Stanley, are called in to find the statue and then the disappeared fiancee. Whereas in the movie Venus is called back to Olympus by divine wrath, in the show she realises what her beloved has in mind for their future, 1940s style domesticity in Ozone heights, and ships out leaving a simulacrum who will be happy with Rodney. The general shape is similar to a conventional Broadway romantic comedy, with a touch of vaudeville, but everything is entertainingly out of kilter. There are the familiar love songs -- "Speak low" and "My foolish heart" as well as "West wind". The title song is slightly smutty, highlighting the fact that you can be ruder if you are dealing with a classical theme. The rhyme goddess/bodice lets you get away with a lot. The comic numbers are in the right sort of places to vary the pace, and weird (very much in the style of Nash) rather than killingly funny. There's a back-handed love song -- "more than the Axis hates the Allies, that's how much I love you" -- and a totally irrelevant and mildly surreal number describing New Jersey in terms of the wild west. Either it had a topical relevance that everyone has forgotten or it was just lying around and someone decided to use it to fill out the first act. On the slender excuse that Rodney is suspected of having murdered his fiancee Gloria, the first act ends with the very long, very strange and decidedly Brechtian ballad of Dr Crippen. Amazingly, this works terrifically. It has something of the impact of The ballad of Jenny, and leaves you cheering and exhilarated in spite of, well, almost everything about it. The second act includes a splendid accumulative number, Catch Hatch, a tour de force that foreshadows the opening of Guys and Dolls, where four or five groups of singers build up an ensemble with different themes. The only real downside is the Agnes de Mille ballets, which were plausibly reproduced in this production but came over as pretty turgid unless you like that sort of thing. (The only musical ballet that really works is the one in The bandwagon, and that's probably because of Fred Astaire, and because it's an up-front parody.) The first one Forty minute for lunch has Venus converting one working girl stuck in the grind into a romantic ballerina doing a pas de deux with her swain. The second one The Bacchanal is supposed to be a context for Venus letting rip after she imagines her future domesticity in Ozone heights, but de Mile's idea of eroticism isn't quite up to Weill's music. This concert production by The Lost Musical has a first-rate cast, most of them currently in West End shows, which restricts the performances to the usual Sundays and matinees. The staging was very basic, apart from the ballet, but gave a fair idea of the possibilities for a full production. In addition, instead of the usual pianos, a small full orchestra gives full mileage to Weill's score. Louise Gold looked slightly too wholesome at first as Venus, but she has the flat cheekbones and statuesque figure of an Attic kore, if not any known statue of Venus. And she was splendidly cryptic and not quite human, but at the same time very naughty. She delivered her music, which has a very limited range, with understated intensity, resisting the obvious temptation to torch everything because she could. Jessica Martin was very funny as the no-nonsense Molly Grant, and got her money's worth out of the acerbic song about the rich, Very, Very, Very. Lori Haley Fox was suitably irritating as Gloria, Rodney's fiancee and Myra Sands was even worse as her mother. Michael Cantwell as Rodney has a bit of a foghorn voice, and nearly wrecked the duet versions of Speak low. But his performance of his own comic numbers got the words over in detail, and he was appropriately gormlessly paranoid. Ethan Freeman, who has done a lot of Phantoms and Beasts, was wonderfully slimy as Whitelaw Savory, and he was even better at putting over his songs than the rest of the cast. He made West wind very sad, but only a little more than the sentimental maunderings of an incorrigible philanderer, and was superbly sinister in Dr Crippen. Kerry Shale was on top of the double talk as the private investigator Taxi Black, and Daniel Gillingwater was wonderfully obtuse as his sidekick Stanley. This is definitely a show that needs a revival, and this cast would be pretty good in one. Hopefully we won't have to wait until Mamma Mia finishes before Louise Gold and Lori Haley Fox are available (it is going to outlast The mousetrap at this rate). One touch of Venus would be much more fun to do.