This show shouldn’t work at all. Chris Bond’s script shamelessly sentimentalises the life story of its subject, Lionel Bart. It’s overlong and undisciplined; and its string of numbers from Bart’s catalogue of musicals (Oliver!, Blitz!, Fings Ain’t Wot they Used t’Be) and pop songs (Livin’ Doll, Little White Bull) demonstrates that while some of his work has endured, it was often forgettable and occasionally dire. Bob Carlton’s ragged production features an erratic cast of actor- musicians. Yet somehow, you find yourself more or less won over.

Bart’s tunes, with their dewy-eyed emotionalism and chin-up chirpiness, nicely suit his biography, as freely reimagined by Bond. It’s a Fine Life! is a hoary rags-to- riches tale of a lonely man chasing adoration in showbiz. Bart’s rise from wartime Jewish East End boy to millionaire composer and friend to the stars, and his fall into drugs, booze and bankruptcy supplies numerous cues for a song, the lachrymose Where is Love?, from Oliver!, supplying the theme.

That Dickensian musical was Bart’s biggest success, and Bond weaves its characters into his own show. Bill Sykes is an anti-Semitic bully, Nancy his punchbag girlfriend; Fagin turns up as the dodgy accountant who speeds Bart’s ruination by suggesting he sell the rights to the Oliver! songs to keep his disastrous Robin Hood musical, Twang!!, afloat. The writer largely skirts around Bart’s homosexuality, giving us instead a reinvented Charlie Bates — a loyal friend who is a transvestite and who, when Bart hits rock bottom, sings a Cage aux Folles-style rendition of As Long as He Needs Me. It’s brave but schmaltzy.

If Matt Devitt’s likeable Lionel never develops beyond cliché, the other dramatis personae are thinner still, from snooty critics to prancing luvvies. Only Diana Croft, who plays the theatre director Joan Littlewood with an endearing irascibility, manages much impact. But there’s a bustling goodwill about Carlton’s rough- theatre approach, with its multi-tasking actors, and it just about comes off. For all its faults, you have to admire its chutzpah.

Sam Marlowe

The Times - 4th September 2006

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