Fascinating Aida: One Last Flutter, Comedy Theatre, London
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Your support makes all the difference.Fascinating Aida's show One Last Flutter is, in places, showbizzy and unashamedly sentimental. But who would grudge the original threesome - Dillie Keane, Adèle Anderson and Marilyn Cutts, augmented by Russell Churney at the piano - a backslap down memory lane? It is their farewell tour, after all... or is it?
This mix of old and a dozen new songs, interspersed with comic banter regarding their imminent split after 20 years, opens with their old paean to glamming up a drab life, "Sew On a Sequin", and a devoted audience cheer. There's the catchy - oh dear - "Herpes Tango", too. And a snatch from my particular favourite, "Moscow, Moscow", a strident Broadway musical version of Chekhov's Three Sisters - "Moscow, Moscow I'm a-comin'/ Get those balalaikas strummin'."
Director Christopher Luscombe's perfectly judged evening is aided by Keane and Anderson's sure feel for poignancy and real emotion among the laughs. "Little Shadows" tells of the ache of a childless couple while Cutts sails through the tear-stained bluesy love song "You Keep Me Awake at Night". It is a hard balance to strike without tipping over into the mawkish, but it is achieved with ease here.
Noël Coward still casts a shadow over the work, which is no bad thing for those of us who believe the cornerstone of that writer's legend lies not in his plays but in his songwriting. But FA do not share Coward's reactionary tendencies and there is venom and radicalism wrapped up in their sweetness and hilarity. In the new songs, age is very much on FA's minds. "We're not so much Atomic Kitten," quips the marvellously imposing Anderson, "as Atomic Mutton." A song about the menopause follows, effortlessly funny from the title down - "Is It Hot in Here or Is It Me?"
War, too, is a persistent theme, lyrically and musically. Suddenly the seeming frivolity of "New Zealand" - a panto songsheet descends - serves only to make the impact bolder, with couplets such as: "There's a pleasant life to be had/ Away from the jihad." Indeed, the songsheet could even be seen as polite Middle England's answer to the sing-along-a-Vietnam moments at Woodstock. Protest reaches the Home Counties, and it only took 35 years.
The wistful "Socialist Britain" has all the power and poignancy of a yearning wartime song. The closing number, "Stick Your Head Between Your Legs and Kiss Your Arse Goodbye", is a 21st century take on Coward's satirical antithesis to a morale-building number, "There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner". Bleak, cynical, deeply anti-Bush and very funny. Indeed, if this is to be the girls' last outing, shouldn't Mayor Livingstone arrange tickets for the President's official visit? I'm sure he'd love it.
To 6 December (0870 060 6622)
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