| Performance details | Venue: York Theatre Royal Dates: 13 - 24 Feb Tickets: £5 - £18 Box Office: 01904 623568 |
Watching Thoroughly Modern Millie, the new musical comedy at York Theatre Royal, is like being whipped around a high-speed circus carousel: you leave almost nauseatingly giddy, but grinning like an idiot. The show tells the story of Millie (Alexa Chaplin), a young hillbilly from Kansas, who arrives in roaring twenties New York to try and claim her bite of the Big Apple. It’s the jazz age, (which means twee suits for the “daddies” and flapper dresses for the “dames”) and beneath the bright, swirling lights of the city – and the glare of the spotlight on stage – NYC’s newest resident and her friends are throwing jazz hands about like nobody’s business.  | | 'Modern' Millie with her wealthy boss |
Flitting from street scene to penthouse to speakeasy, there’s little to worry about but money and absolutely everything to chase after. The result? Many a rousing show tune, a bit of slapstick comedy in the more meant-to-be-serious moments and general crowd-courting silliness. In a sense, it’s a rather suspect plot: Millie throws herself into the role of enlightened “modern woman” with ambition that stretches only as far as a secretarial desk and the intention of marrying her boss for his money; and while the crazy Oriental dragon lady, Mrs. Meers (Sarah Barker), gets cackle after chortle from the audience, you’re also uncomfortably aware that she’s simultaneously drugging and selling Millie’s friends into “white slavery” – which is no laughing matter, really. But then again, apart from Millie (and she never looks convincingly bothered), who really cares? The cast of TMM are the equivalent of an American cheerleading squad, nimbly tip-tapping their way through a host of irrepressibly jazzy, upbeat numbers, with toothy smiles the width of a football pitch and an enthusiasm that had even audience members old enough to remember the Julie Andrews movie version singing and stamping their walking sticks along with the music. (With well over fifty percent of those around me boasting an entire head of grey, the ground actually shook.) It’s a thoroughly enjoyable, spirited performance and with tickets starting at a fiver, you’d be an idiot to miss it. Jo Shelley | 
