Thoroughly Modern Millie

The latest film to make the jump from celluloid to stage is Thoroughly Modern Millie, a 1967 hit for Julie Andrews and a 2002 hit on Broadway.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

TOM SUTCLIFFE:
Germaine Greer, the curtain for this has a vast blown up definition of the word "modern", which includes the phrase "not obsolete". It's not often that you pick a fight with a safety curtain, but I wondered about it the other night. What about you?

GERMAINE GREER:
Well, it's pantomime, I think. The story is so thin that it has to be a kind of pantomime, you have to jump into another world to get anywhere with it.

SUTCLIFFE:
Do you like pantomime?

GREER:
The thing about pantomime is that you have an interaction with the audience. I did want to say to Mrs Meers: "Not that door, that door. Yeah!" and you want her to play the audience because she is so miserable up there, she just wants any help from anybody.

SUTCLIFFE:
She certainly played it as if it was only four days to Christmas!

MICHAEL ROSEN:
Well, it was nearly wishy- washy, wasn't it, from panto. Oh, I did so want to enjoy this. I mean here's, what is she, she is almost Dorothy from Kansas, isn't she, grown up from The Wizard of Oz, she arrives, where does she arrive? New York City. Where was New York City? I mean you heard there Dick Scanlan describe it as somehow that he put New York City on the stage, he didn't. I wanted the whole of that first half to be bustling with tram cars, with people zooming to and fro, I wanted pretzel sellers and bagel sellers, I wanted the whole thing.

SUTCLIFFE:
No, she bumps into one pedestrian didn't she!

ROSEN:
It doesn't come in! Yeah, it came alive at the beginning of the second half where we had a lovely scene in the office, and it came alive, and then it works.

SUTCLIFFE:
That was Rob Ashford's choreography, which I thought was really the best thing in the whole evening. Paul Morley, what about you?

PAUL MORLEY:
I enjoyed it on a sense I made it become a musical version of the story of Amanda Holden and Les Dennis, and then I could enjoy it!

GREER:
You tart!

MORLEY:
You know when you come out of a musical like this, the way I gage it is how gay do I feel, in the Fred Aster sense? I didn't feel gay at all! What's fascinating about it though is, watching Amanda Holden is a little bit like watching a really kind of work horse English midfield player, you know, it's all technique, really trying really hard.

ROSEN:
They were horrible to her, they made her stare at somewhere in the lower circle in the middle. For the whole of the first-half. Her eyeballs didn't move once, she just went: boing!

SUTCLIFFE:
She did look pretty unhappy though.

MORLEY:
She didn't want anybody to give her a hint that it wasn't working for her. It has to work for her and that's the whole point!

ROSEN:
I think they made her do that, and it was a shame, because, you know, she should come alive and she couldn't and didn't. I mean it was a shame.

GREER:
She was a rabbit in the headlights. She was paralysed with terror.

SUTCLIFFE:
Germaine, what about, they've added extra music for this, it's not terribly easy to distinguish it from the rest of the music, what about that?

GREER:
I can't remember a single note. Well, it was a bit like the Eurovision song contest, they sang out of tune. It was driving me crazy.

ROSEN:
I saw you tapping your finger to Forget About the Boy. I did! Though you cussed under your breath and said: "They're not boys!!", because you're an expert.

GREER:
No I did not say that! You fibber. No, no, I said to you...

MORLEY:
They did the great new song "Mammy" of course, in Chinese.

GREER:
Oh yes, which my father sang to me in my cradle.

ROSEN:
That's the most crazy piece of stage schlock ever.

MORLEY:
I think it's the 10-year-olds and we'll just have to live with that.

GREER:
But it's impossible to understand!

SUTCLIFFE:
You'll be delighted to know that we have ran out of time, it sounds to me like it's green glass and not the emerald.