However, many of the songs lack lasting impact, and its pleasant tunes will not linger on your mind for long after leaving the theatre.
‘The Perfect Spy’ in particular, an uplifting duet between the protagonist and his daughter, strikes right at the heart of the show and legitimately inspires with its rousing melody. The score, composed by Ben Morales Frost with lyrics provided by Richard Hough, is functional enough in advancing the plot and capitalising on its more theatrical moments and is often entertaining with a handful of standout moments. Wormold takes the advice of his friend Hasselbacher, a German doctor, and sells false secrets to the British government in order to appease them and perpetuate his newfound income, however when a fictitious pilot named Raúl whom he has fabricated turns up very much real and very much dead, the situation becomes less straightforward. Eager to appease his wilful teenage daughter, James Wormold (think Bond with a Panama hat and a mid-life crisis) accepts an offer of employment, selling secrets to the British secret service, despite not having access to this information. Occupational hazards are also the subject of the show itself – a British expatriate living in Havana, Cuba finds himself in mortal peril, not because of his work as a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman, but because he finds himself embroiled in a web of international espionage. The juxtaposition of the two different depictions does inherently invite comparison, and while this more sophisticated production offers greater depth in its character development, it shows less ingenuity and is altogether not as much fun.
There’s form for differing interpretations of spy stories, the new musical production of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is making its meteoric rise to smash hit status on the London stage alongside the release of a film adaptation of the same true events, and while the zany Vaults version of ‘Our Man in Havana’ bore similarities to Mincemeat’s offbeat humour, with a cast of five shifting into numerous roles, utilising props made out of a deconstructed hoover, this latter Havana is its entirely more serious younger sibling. On this occasion, though I’d first seen ‘Our Man in Havana’ presented as an hour-long comedic escapade at the 2020 Vaults Festival, a new version of the same Grahame Greene novel opened last night at the enchanting Watermill Theatre in Newbury as a two-act, actor musician book musical with a decidedly more serious tone.
It can be considered an occupational hazard, as a prolific theatre reviewer, to find yourself seeing multiple different stage adaptations of the same source material.
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