The smooth transition from dialogue to songs in musicals is the genre’s toughest trick, with the talk sometimes feeling like a warm-up for the key material.
Unusually, the musical adaptation of Only Fools and Horses – the revered BBC sitcom featuring deluded Peckham entrepreneur Del Boy Trotter – has the opposite problem. The comic dialogue is so delightful that it’s tempting to resent its interruption by songs that sometimes seem to have been included merely to justify the show’s title.
This isn’t a serious handicap because John Sullivan (1946-2011) was one of the greatest ever TV writers, bringing to the sitcom a Dickensian knack for characterisation and catchphrases.
The creator’s son, Jim Sullivan, and Paul Whitehouse, who also appealingly plays a cameo role as Grandad Trotter, have exhaustively combed the seven series and 16 specials of Only Fools and Horses, broadcast between 1981 and 2011, for the senior Sullivan’s absolute best punchlines, puns, malapropisms, misunderstandings, and sight gags.
The two most famous visual jokes in the TV show – involving a wobbling chandelier and a hinged flap on a bar – are either included, or alluded to, both nicely timed to tease the audience’s anticipation of whether they can be staged. Fresh material includes an enjoyable fantasy flash-forward from the show’s 1989 setting to the Peckham of today, where posh coffee, old clothes and houses are being sold to people who may be getting as dodgy a deal as the customers of Trotter Independent Trading.
It’s hard, though, to escape the feeling that the score came up short. The 20 songs span the work of 11 composers or lyricists. John Sullivan’s theme tune for the TV series, that catchy mockney anthem to tax evasion and Thatcherite values, is flanked by several originals from combinations of Jim Sullivan, Whitehouse, and the late Chas Hodges. The younger Sullivan fittingly invokes Lionel Bart, the leader of the East End musical genre with Oliver and Fings Ain’t What They Use To Be, in a lovely ballad of yearning, called The Girl, and gives Del Boy a witty wide-boy’s love song, Bit of a Sort.
But these new numbers are padded out with jukebox inclusions, including two old Chas and Dave hits and the Bill Withers soul song Lovely Day, always worth a listen but, in this musical, feeling as knock-off as the goods on Del Boy’s market stall.
Performers in an adaptation of a beloved cultural product face the dilemma of whether to impersonate the original stars. Tom Bennett’s Del Boy affectionately channels David Jason’s jaunty misplaced confidence, while Peter Baker, as the monumentally thick Trigger, is more of a lookalike for Roger Lloyd Pack’s TV turn than a Tussaud’s model could manage. Dianne Pilkington benefits from claiming greater interpretative freedom with Raquel, Del Boy’s love interest, giving the character a strength and individuality that usefully dilute the period sexism of some of the authentic 1980s pub-talk.
The finest collection of vintage gags on the London stage should allow the show to make a fair amount of what Del Boy calls “lovely jubbly”. But, as a musical, a few too many of the songs are, to borrow again from the Trotter lingo, plonkers.
Only Fools and Horses - The Musical is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London
