Save the Last Dance for Me: New Theatre, Oxford

While the course of true love never did run smooth, the path towards happiness explored in Save the Last Dance for Me surely presents the couple travelling along it with at least one bump too many. Each time Luton lovely Marie (Elizabeth Carter) appears to be heading for happiness with her beau Curtis (Kieran McGinn), another difficulty looms up to dash their hopes. It all becomes rather trying.

But the holidaying heroine is bidding for a union across a wide cultural divide — she a 17-year-old virgin schoolgirl, her beloved a sexually experienced US airman in his mid-twenties based in a camp close to the resort (the last resort?) of Lowestoft.

Enough reason, you might think, for her mum and dad (Sally Peerless and Alex Hammond) to object to the romance. An added problem — in Curtis’s eyes at least — is that he is black, although this seems of no concern to anybody else, unlikely as this might seem in the Britain of 1963, of which I possess clear memories.

The famously sharp comedy writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran must do as well. Yet having introduced the temptingly ‘touchy’ issue of race into their musical, they baulk at showing us a realistic representation of the drama that might have resulted from it.

This is understandable, given they are out to supply light-hearted entertainment. Like the pair’s earlier success Dreamboats and Petticoats, this is entertainment — in the experienced hands of director Bill Kenwright — designed to showcase some of the great pop hits of the 1960s.

The focus this time is principally, though not exclusively, on the American song-writing duo of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. While hardly household names, they penned lots of big hits, including the Elvis smashes Suspicion and His Latest Flame — which Ms Carter and Mr McGinn, in turn, perform splendidly, with the on-stage band of the air base social club.

Plot details are designed to reflect the content of the songs — Marie, for instance, being the name of that famous flame. Occasionally, I felt that this didn’t quite work. There was urgent debate post-show in Jamie’s Italian prompted by my contention that when Curtis addressed She’s Not You (another stonker from The King) to a young lady out to usurp Marie in his affections, he should really have been singing “You’re not her”. As musical convention demands, there is a subsidiary romantic interest, composed of Marie’s elder, and more worldly wise, sister Jennifer (Verity Jones) and her ‘Italian’ — in truth, broad, comic Brummie — ice-cream salesman admirer Carlo. Another principal character is Curtis’s good-sort pal Milton.

On Monday’s press night, both Carlo and Milton were portrayed by stand-ins from lower down the cast list. That Joe McCourt and Alan Howell acquitted themselves with great distinction in these key roles clearly revealed the strength-in-depth of this fine production. Mr McCourt supplied a sensational falsetto performance of Hushabye, while Mr Howell’s delivery of Len Barry’s 1-2-3 was a knockout.

Save the Last Dance for Me
New Theatre, Oxford
Until Saturday
For tickets, call 0844 871 3020 or visit atgtickets/oxford