A Face in the Crowd
Young Vic, London

 
THERE’S not a great deal wrong with this musical adaptation of the 1957 US film of the same name: the two leads are excellent, the music and lyrics by Elvis Costello are a cut above the ordinary and the sets and costumes are at times dazzling.

What it lacks, though, is a storyline that offers any attention-grabbing intrigue. 

From the off it’s clear what will happen to the two main characters, Marcia Jeffries (Anoushka Lucas), an ambitious small-town radio broadcaster, and Lonesome Rhodes (Ramin Karimloo), a semi-hobo songwriter and storyteller whom she discovers languishing in the county jail. 

After Marcia gives Lonesome airtime on her show he proves to be a big hit, moving quickly on to the national networks and then to TV, where he even more swiftly heads towards a Presley-esque decline into sell-out and vacuity, as well as an increasingly unhinged ambition to become president of the US.

That all will go badly wrong seems obvious from the outset, and there are no notable forks in the road where the audience is given hope of anything other than a descent into fame- and drug-addled chaos. 

Back in the ’50s, and especially given the novelty of television, the plotline may have seemed fairly original. But seven decades later the story follows such a well-worn path that it’s difficult to wring from it any tension, even if one admits that the modern rise of social media and populist politics lends it some renewed relevance.

While it would be nice to have an all-consuming plot to go with the songs, at least Sarah Ruhl’s book provides a sound framework on which to hang some decent compositions that have Costello’s sweetly melancholic, emotionally charged signature all over them.

Lucas, a rising star, uses her distinctively jazz-inflected voice to make the best of Costello’s offerings as she presents Marcia as a confident yet highly conflicted woman, clear about what she wants but uncertain about how to get it. Karimloo confidently projects the necessary charisma and chutzpah to convince us that Lonesone really is a special, if fatally flawed, personality.

In the end, however, what prevents A Face in the Crowd from being really good, rather than just nicely entertaining, is the lack of a narrative backbone to make it crackle.

That might have been addressed with some more adjustments by Ruhl to Budd Schulberg’s original screenplay, but in the absence of any such changes it’s still a watchable venture that’s easy on the eyes and ears. 

Runs until November 9. Box office: (020) 7922-2922, youngvic.org.