Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera), review — a premier painted in broad strokes

“The whole wide world is run by assholes,” chorus the cast jauntily as they pirouette round the stage brandishing photos of despots, dictators and megalomaniacs past and present in the raucous closing number of Tony! (The Tony Blair Rock Opera). 

And to be fair, that is probably the conclusion, at least in part, of a hefty swath of the world’s greatest plays — though they might care to phrase it a little more delicately. But delicacy is not in the vocabulary of this musical by Harry Hill and Steve Brown, which trots through the premiership of Tony Blair with all the subtlety of a wasp at a picnic: from the glory days of a thumping majority, the Good Friday Agreement and Cool Britannia to the inglorious “dodgy dossier” and carnage in Iraq. To say it’s a show of two halves would be putting it mildly; the question is whether it can manage that switch and whether it has anything new to tell us about it all.

Like its protagonist, it starts promisingly, bursting on to the chessboard stage in a blaze of enthusiasm, song and exceedingly broad but often funny satire. We’re whisked through young Tony’s early years, his arrival at Oxford and his induction into politics, all of which, in this version of events, takes him rather by surprise, while he is busy dreaming of being a new Mick Jagger.

The Labour party swirls around him in larger-than-life black and red: here’s Martin Johnston’s Neil Kinnock making speeches; Rosie Strobel’s bustling John Prescott; Kaye Brown’s Robin Cook in a preposterous wig; Gary Trainor’s disconsolate Gordon Brown delivering a solo about macroeconomics; Howard Samuels’ saturnine Peter Mandelson silkily masterminding affairs, pulling strings and even constructing balloon dogs to entertain the crowd.

The style, in Peter Rowe’s upbeat staging, is Edinburgh Fringe shoestring musical — props are wheeled on, everyone wears deliberately terrible wigs, the fine cast all perform with snap and crackle. Brown’s music offers a smorgasbord of pastiche from Sondheim to rock anthem to Flanagan and Allen — and there are enough quick-fire gags to bounce us along.

Charlie Baker’s Blair rolls through it all, wide-eyed and semi-detached, until in sashays Holly Sumpton’s Cherie, with a Louise Brooks bob and an attitude, and proceeds to tango her man into realising his political potential. It’s all beadily nostalgic — oh look there’s Princess Diana (Madison Swan, delightfully doe-eyed and demure) — and given where we are now, there’s something touching about seeing a political set-up that comes over as showbiz- and spin-fixated but did achieve things such as the minimum wage.

But then, well, stuff happens as the saying goes. Suddenly Osama bin Laden is spinning around the stage chanting “kill the infidel”, Saddam Hussein is warbling “I never got anything wrong” and Bush and Blair are celebrating their special relationship in a lopsided duet. As The Producers tells us, musicals can be outrageous, but here the mix of horror and humour feels uncomfortable and the genial slapdash style is not up to handling the material.

Meanwhile, the show’s overall purpose feels confused. Painting its subject as a bit of a goofball means that in the end it is neither bitingly satirical nor dramatically reflective on the journey he takes or on the perils of power and fame. So what is its point? Sadly, daft wigs and gags aren’t enough to see this through.

★★★☆☆

To July 9, parktheatre.co.uk