Christopher Walker reviews Bonnie & Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde’s murderous story may seem an odd subject for a musical.
But then this accomplished production highlights their roles as founders of the American cult of celebrity.
With enough sudden flashes and loud bangs to cause a few fatalities in the audience too.
In the early 1930s Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow rampaged across America’s deep South robbing banks and funeral parlours.
Along the way they murdered eleven people, mainly policemen.
Explaining their own, untried, execution in a police ambush where they were shot 130 times.
They were just kids.
Clyde was 17 when first arrested, Bonnie married at 15, and their accomplice WD Jones (airbrushed out of this piece) joined them at 16.
Their youth and good looks made them public icons, well captured in this work by the trio of Broadway royalty Ivan Menchell, Don Black and Frank Wildhorn.
Clyde, Jordan Luke Gage, the gorgeous Romeo in &Juliet, bounds across the stage and booms out ditties about cars and guns.
Bonnie is also played well as the dreamy innocent by Frances Mayli McCann.
The reality was she herself did plenty of the killing.
Jodie Steele, a strong singer, and witty comic, is simply fabulous as Clyde’s sister-in-law Blanche.
She was wearing shades and Jodhpurs when finally arrested, one of the most glamourous crime shots in history.
All of the cast are top of their game.
Especially Cleve September as Bonnie’s admirer, and Dom Hartley-Harris as the Preacher.
Some darker underlying themes are hinted at.
Was Clyde’s slaughter of law officers revenge for his prison rape?
The public’s easy manipulation by Bonnie to accept them as style icons, posing for photos and writing poetry for the newspapers.
Ten thousand swarmed when they died, and trophy-hunters snipped Bonnie’s hair.
One even tried to cut off Clyde’s trigger finger.
The police themselves stole his saxophone, clothes, guns and even the car. On display at a Nevada casino to this day.
Chilling. As is remembering Bonnie & Clyde had to steal automatic weapons from police arsenals.
Today they’d just buy them at Walmart.
Website: https://thegarricktheatre.co.
Picture: Dom Hartley-Harris ‘Preacher’, Jodie Steele ‘Blanche’, Jordan Luke Gage ‘Clyde’, George Maguire ‘Buck’, Frances Mayli McCann ‘Bonnie’, Cleve September ‘Ted’. Photos by Darren Bell
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