An effortlessly funny Tori Burgess invests Cherie Blair (née Booth) with a Scouse accent so thichhhh, sorry thick, that the cast of Vardy V Rooney will be green with envy. When she first gets together with Tony, her orgiastic, mid-coital screams are of potential Labour policies. The nature of their relationship is hinted at in a song in which Tony sings “I’m like Macbeth / Because she’s my Lady”.
Rosie Strobel plays a magnificently pugnacious John Prescott in the style of a working-class Northern comic. “You looking at my jags” he bellows at an unfortunate audience member who catches his eye. Robin Cook’s libidinous zeal is a running punchline but when he resigns unable to support military action in Iraq without international agreement, his line “the only law I’ll break is the marital law” acquires a weight beyond the humour.
Special praise has to go to Howard Samuels‘ scene-stealing, fourth-wall-breaking performance as Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson. Him schooling of Blair on the merits of carrot and stick is a joy. Even better, when demonstrating shaping the agenda via the medium of making a balloon animal, Samuels not only has the audience in stitches but has his fellow cast members openly corpsing.
The vocal prowess of the entire cast is uniformly excellent and effortlessly sell Steve Brown’s upbeat song collection. I’m Gonna Be Somebody captures Blairs messianic fervour, not least by echoing the 70s pop-rock of Jesus Christ Superstar. Very cleverly Gordon Brown’s Macroeconomics takes a verbatim speech from 1994 and is accompanied only by an organ backing to suggest the sort of Presbyterian caution of Blair’s dour successor. As huge fans of Steve Brown’s award-winning 1998 musical Spend Spend Spend, we were delighted to hear Tony and Cherie’s duet She’s A Lady / He’s My Baby sharing the same DNA as Spend’s Sexual Happening.