How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying ★★★★
Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows’ Tony award-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying has been reinvigorated at the Southwark Playhouse with a new take on its satirical roots. It embraces the charmingly cartoonish nature of its original caricatures whilst exploding gender conformity with satisfying pops.
J.Pierrepont Finch (Gabrielle Friedman) is a window cleaner with ambition. Using a handy guidebook to climbing the corporate ladder Finch gets a foot in the door in the mailroom at World Wide Wicket Company. Within a week that role has been leveraged into Manager, and then Vice President. Finch has a mixture of charm and cunning that would be off-putting except that the competition for those roles are incompetents whirling in a corporation that is a merry-go-round of idiocy and nepotism. At the top is J.B. Biggley (Tracie Bennett) who Finch manipulates by faking mutual interests and discovering that Biggley has hired a lover, Heddy Larue (Annie Aitken) as one of the secretaries. As Finch rises a romantic entanglement ensues with another secretary, Rosemary Pilkington (Allie Daniel) who, whilst having a heart of gold, is as ambitious to marry as Finch is to climb the greasy pole. Rosemary is Finch’s biggest cheerleader from the start, and even when the plot casts doubt on Finch’s worthiness, Rosemary is there to make sure Finch’s butt is protected.
It would be wrong to call the casting gender blind. The casting is deliberate and deft. Even a triumph. In switching some of the male characters to female and non-binary actors it adds visual commentary to the absurd gender roles of the original. It’s hard to imagine that a song called ‘A Secretary is Not a Toy’ could rise beyond the ick without that disinfectant. Taken from a book written in the 1950s by Shepherd Mead and turned into a musical set in the workplace of the 1960s, its HR infractions are subverted for the contemporary audience by the mish-mashing of gender interpretations. It’s so much more fun to watch capers rather than crimes.
The tunes are catchy and camp. The dreary world of the corporate drones shines in songs like ‘Coffee Break’ where death is seen as preferable to a shortage of arabica. Rosemary gets the sympathetic moments with Happy to Keep His Dinner Warm, where clever lyrics save it from slavish simpering, and the very tender I Believe in You. Brotherhood of Man and Company Way bring the whole cast together to make it clear all ill feelings have been washed away in the suds of capitalism for a rousing ending.
How to Succeed in Business stood on a precarious ledge. The great satire of capitalism would have been insufficient without Director Georgie Rankcom rerouting it to include more swipes at gender. It kicked it straight into 2023. Hurray for the happy relief of absurdity.
Review by ANDREW HEBDENQueerguru Contributing Editor ANDREW HEBDEN is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing, and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement, he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre, and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day
