Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera

Vicious but Delicious

Tony!  The Tony Blair Rock Opera

music and lyrics by Steve Brown, book by Harry Hill

Nicholson Green Productions at Richmond Theatre until 24^th June, then on tour until 14^th October

Review by Mark Aspen

We seem to hear quite a lot recently from Tony Blair, an ex-Prime Minister who can’t seem to stay ex-.  For such a contentious figure, who held sway during one of the (many) highly controversial of times in modern British politics, perhaps blowing one’s own trumpet, “blairing” out, as one might say, is not a good move.  Don’t put you head above the parapet, Sir Tony, for there are satirists about.

Enter Harry Hill … 

Hill’s well-sharpened pen has busily been at work, in spite of there being a number of more recent ex-PM’s who might attract a satirist’s vitriolic ink.   But how do you satirise a man who presided over the disintegration of British society, who capitulated to the terrorists in Northern Ireland, and who notoriously triggered the explosion in the Middle East that has horrifically destabilised the region for nearly a quarter of a century?  The answer, you make the satire into a comedy musical! 

Enter Steve Brown …

Brown’s starting point is the muddled public schoolboy, just up to Oxford, who is a Mick Jagger wannabe.  Thence, Hill and Brown have created together (for they work in tandem) what they call, “a reckless reappraisal of the life of former Ugly Rumours front man and Britain’s first pop Prime Minister, Tony Blair”.

Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera has hit town, seventeen towns in fact, on a tour that takes in most provincial grand theatres; plus one parish hall, provocatively that of Sedgefield in Co. Durham, Blair’s former constituency; and finishes, perhaps even more provocatively, at the Liverpool Playhouse during the week of the Labour Party Conference.

Here is a musical that fairly rattles along, so bursting with energy that you can almost see the steam as it races along from Cool Britannia to Cruel Blairmania, even as we hit the interval with “What could possibly go wrong?”   Along the way it takes in David Blunkett’s blindness, the death of Diana and a plethora of dictators.  All is fair game.

“Isn’t this all a bit distasteful?” you might ask.  Yes, of course it is, but that is the whole point.  If Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers can have a song Springtime for Hitler, then this is small beer.   However, this is British satire, and British satire at its most hard-hitting.  Charles Dickens would recognise the power of caricature and local man William Hogarth would be rolling in his grave with laughter.  Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera is as delicious as it is vicious.

The musical’s timeframe is cradle to grave.  We witness Tony’s birth, already with the Blair trademark rictus grin as he emerges from the womb, and the show is parenthesised by his deathbed confessional.  The Blair we are presented with is propelled to fame, and to the highest offices of the land, in spite of himself.  His advances are due to the manipulation of those around him.  His inspiration from childhood is to be a rock star, like Mick Jagger, while those highest offices and his overvaulting ambitions are merely a substitute for pop culture stardom.

Jack Whittle plays a brilliant Tony Blair, lithe in movement and slippery in gesture, the tempo, rhythm and register of his speech as authentic as his shrugs and grins.  His character is a schoolboy, dazzled by celebrity and easily led.  When he is led into leadership, his reformed Labour Party becomes New Labour on the teenage reminiscence that The Seekers become the New Seekers.  His is to be a party driven by popular culture, and empty vessels make the most noise.

Hence Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera is all packaged neatly as a musical.  Musical director Tara Litvack leads the band, Ben Uden’s guitars and Harry Bent’s drums, from the keyboard, tirelessly whirling through Brown’s adroit but eclectic score, referencing everything from heavy metal to Sondheim.  And, hold on, was there a brief homage to Handel, here praising the messianic Blair!

The dour son of the manse, Gordon Brown is played by Phil Sealy as boorish and belching, uncouth, but uneasy with all the second-bests he gets dealt by Blair, from being swindled out of the top bunk at Oxford, through to Blair’s reneging on the divvying of power with Brown.  The so-called Granita Deal, the Brown-Blair agreement, struck in an Islington gastro-pub, on how they should share the great offices of state, is depicted as a literal boxing match.   Later we hear the disgruntled Gordon Brown as Chancellor, in his solo spot, Macroeconomics, a verbatim transcription of a speech that Steve Brown has set as an operatic recitative.

As the manipulators of Blair, the earliest in is Cherie Blair, portrayed with gimlet precision by Tori Burgess, as a Scouser off-Wirral Lady Macbeth.  (Everyone is “chuck”.)  She seduces Tony as soon as they meet, cutting a Piaf image as a chanteuse, albeit in ungrammatical French.  She goes on to explain the tenets of Marxism to him during coitus (on-stage … standing!).  The Cherie is seen more as the blowzy Social Workers Party activist than the elite part-time High Court judge.

The arch-manipulator is of course Peter Mandelson, and Howard Samuels is priceless in this Mephistophelean role, smooth, satiny and saurian.  The campery may be ostentatious, but the cunning is concealed (from Blair at least).  The audience too are drawn into the net as he makes us complicit by occasionally breaking the fourth wall … sotto voce with a wink.  Mandelson’s sway is suave and slippery and Samuels laces it with lasciviousness.  A case in point is the explanation of the power of the “carrot and stick”, with real (and overtly phallic) carrot, and real (traditional commedia dell’arte slatted slap-stick) stick.  Samuels also has great fun with balloon modelling, going through ambiguous nod-and-a-wink shapes, to a poodle.

Rosie Strobel hits the mark, almost literally, with her portrayal of the pugnacious Prescott.  In a shadow cabinet, many members of which were Scottish born, here is a tanked-up John Prescott blasting that the Scots because “they’re too far north to be proper north”.

Martin Johnston’s Neil Kinnock is marginally more decorously presented, although much is made of Welshness and the Welsh accent is never underdone.  Befitting the role, Johnston has a sonorous voice, grounded in the number Well All Right.

Sally Cheng’s Robin Cook buzzes around wasp-like in an overblown redhead wig and beard, a sex-pest, but an intellectual one.  However, Cook wriggles from the hook of satire as actually having some integrity in his resignation over the Iraq disarmament crisis.   

Diana Princess of Wales is poured out like rich cream on this fruitcake cabinet by a coyly pouting Emma Jay Thomas, portrayed unsentimentally as the seductive sensual Princess Diana.  Far from guileless innocence, here is a Diana who clearly knows what she is doing.  Tony is in there in a shot like a priapic puppy-dog, until brought to heel by a none-too-pleased Cherie.  The oft-quoted “three of us in this marriage” has, with this Diana, a coda … … “if you don’t count the seven of mine”.   The scene is set for The Princess and the Pop Prime Minister, a Travolta-esque set-piece song and dance number, nicely cha-cha-ed by Whittle and Thomas, as the rest of the cast sashay in a slow rhumba, a cabinet entranced.  Choreographer Francesca Jaynes does a fantastic (in all senses) job.

Diana’s death in the Paris car crash is a pivotal moment in Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera.  It wrings out the cynicism of the time.  Mandelson seizes the opportunity.  “Stage the grief” he tells Tony, who grasps the opportunity with both hands, coining the immortal phrases, “The People’s Princess” and “The Queen of Hearts”.   Behind closed doors the whole cabinet cheer exultantly:  they have the public in their pocket.

The heat is turned up in the second half when, after 9/11, George W Bush, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein enter the show with a vengeance, figuratively as well as literally.   The leather blouson wearing Bush, whom Tony hero-worships, together with his slick henchmen, Dick and Dom, namely Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, pump up Tony to a frenzy with the mantra “War on Terror!”   Bush explains the Special Relationship as like “a master and a slave, a man and his dog, a pimp and his hooker”. 

Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are given some show-stopping G&S style patter songs.  Holed up in his cave with a bevy of disgruntled wives, Osama bin Laden goes through the things about the West that get his goat, in his number Kill the Infidel.  These are the materialistic and hedonistic fripperies that he … envies.   However, the show is nigh on stolen by a Groucho Marx lookalike Saddam Hussein, beret, specs and bushy moustache, cigar in hand, who sings his upbeat I Never Done Anything Wrong with animated gusto.

Designer Libby Watson has a well-thought out ad hoc look about this show.  Costumes for New Labour are ill-fitting black suits and flag-red ties.  Wigs are a bit toy-box-ish.  But this all belies what a slick, clever and wittily well-navigated work this this.   Director Peter Rowe calls it an “affectionate piss-take” of characters whose “overweening … egotism makes them fair game”. 

But in the end he comes the sting in the tail.  The closing big-beat finale number The Whole Wide World Is Run by Arseholes, of which many prime examples are shown, makes us all feel pretty smug as we sing along.  Then we realise the show is more than just a lampoon, as Hill, Brown and Rowe turn it around to the audience, pointing out that it is we who fall for show over substance, and we who vote them in (three times in Blair’s case). 

Libby Watson’s neatly packaged set is ready for tour to the largest and smallest venues.

Maybe Keir Starmer and colleagues will take an evening out from this year’s Labour Party Conference to see Tony! The Tony Blair Rock Opera while it is in Liverpool.  Oh, but then again, the might get some ideas.  It is said they might go, but perhaps that’s just Ugly Rumours.

Mark Aspen, June 2023

Photography by Mark Senior