A Face in the Crowd, review: Elvis Costello’s satirical musical isn’t extreme enough to skewer Trump

Howdy partner. Turns out, if you speak all folksy-like, eat red meat, tell stories about Uncle Sam, and maybe do a bit of xenophobia, you can become a demagogue too. So shows recent history, and so shows Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, which followed a drifter who becomes a celebrity and eventually a politician, fomenting ever wilder and more extreme views along the way. No need to ponder why playwright Sarah Ruhl and musician Elvis Costello have chosen this moment to adapt it as a musical.

Ramin Karimloo, better known for big West End and Broadway roles in Phantom and Les Mis, plays Lonesome Rhodes, who starts the story locked up in the local slammer for being drunk and disorderly. Sweet-minded local radio DJ Marcia Jeffries (an always-effortless Anoushka Lucas), wants to put the voices of real people – “from county fairs [and] soup kitchens” – on the airwaves and picks him out. He’s a hit. A big one. A few dozen cracker-barrel aphorisms later, and they’ve got a TV deal. Soon Lonesome is flogging energy pills to millions and advising a presidential hopeful on how to appeal to the average American.

From Costello’s opening number – a bright and breezy song about Marcia’s radio show, all fluttering melodies and jaunty piano – the vibe is kind of kids’ TV. Gone is the rough edge and seriousness of purpose that makes Kazan’s film slightly terrifying. Here, as adapted by Ruhl, the story is a bit schmaltzy, the politics quite hand-holdy, as if the production doesn’t quite trust us to make the Trumpian connections ourselves.

With its cheery 1950s palette and poster-paint backdrop, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production never quite breaks out of its one-dimensionality. Yes, the rhinestones and American flags and guns amass, and there’s a sense of drifting garishly into American nightmare. But, mostly, it has the satirical bite of a Hallmark movie, with the same romantic trajectory.

Credit to Karimloo and Lucas for doing the best with ciphers. In a role that’s been bolstered from the film, Lucas as Marcia manages to hold staunchness and kindness in the same breath, and when she sings, she reveals a vulnerability that’s beautiful to watch. Karimloo has a decent dash of charisma, though excels more in the homely folksiness of the early scenes than the ghoulish demagoguery of the latter ones.

The moments when Costello’s songs kick in are a delight, romping through the great American songbook in all its colours, from folk, soul, country and western – rattling snares, twanging bass – through to gospel, barbershop, military march, and more than a dash of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the anthemic title number. It’s a really smart score, full of witty lyrics and changing textures.

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The book, though, can’t quite settle on whether to wear its allegory lightly or hammer it home – so it veers between the two. And the bigger problem is that it’s built of the same bones as the thing it’s trying to critique: the vapidity of the American dream and how easily it wins people over with cheap sentiment. Can it really dig into the shallowness of the whole thing when it’s structured as a Hollywood story that’s just as shallow?

Maybe more fatally, despite making Rhodes’s opinions more outrageous than in the film, it doesn’t even come to the levels of absurdity and depravity that real life has attained in recent years. What was prescient in 1957, feels, seven decades later, like fond nostalgia. If a satire is less extreme than its target, you do sort of wonder, what’s the point?

‘A Face in the Crowd’ is at the Young Vic until 9 November