Cry-Baby the Musical at the Arcola Theatre review: gloriously trashy in the best way

If I tell you this musical adaptation of John Waters’ 1990 film is gloriously trashy you can take it as high praise indeed. This is a half-ironic, half-loving paean to the juvenile delinquent movies of the 1950s where good girls fall for bad boys.

It has a bouncy score that embraces rock ‘n’ roll, ballads and barbershop, all laced with filthily witty lyrics. Nuclear paranoia, red scares and polio-eradication drives are all part of the mix. It captures Waters’ (the “pope of trash”) love of schmaltzy, schlocky Americana and echoes the lo-fi style of his transgressive early underground flicks like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingoes, all set in his native Baltimore and often starring the drag queen Divine.

But Cry-Baby and its older sister Hairspray (1988, also notably turned into a musical) marked a shift from the confrontational to the affectionate in his oeuvre. There’s still sly spikiness just under the surface, though, which this adaptation acknowledges. You’ve got to love a show that has a number called Girl Can I Kiss You With Tongue that includes the lines “it’s moist and it’s pink/ it’s a muscle I think….” Well, I do, anyway.

The musical, with a book by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, and songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger, was nominated for four Tony Awards on Broadway in 2008 but closed within a year and was then downsized for future productions.

Arcola boss Mehmet Ergen’s staging is brisk and stripped-back but still features a cast of 17, the largest ever at this theatre. The score is uncomplicated but delightful, from the insistently inane Baby Baby Baby to the angry jailhouse slink of A Little Upset. Chris Whittaker’s choreography is basic but well-drilled.

The story is an American Romeo and Juliet story, in the manner of Grease or The Outsiders, but archly exaggerated. Here, Wade ‘Cry-Baby’ Walker is the king of his band of outlaw greasers because his pacifist parents were executed in World War II as communists. The stage version abandons other parts of the film it can’t replicate, like the chicken-run car confrontation and Cry-Baby’s defining ability to shed a single tear. Here he’s dry-eyed, “completely in command/of the lachrymal gland”.

Still, comparisons are inevitable, if invidious. Adam Davidson is a good singer and an excellent dancer but can’t match the sheer beauty and smouldering charisma Johnny Depp brought to the titular, emotionally bruised antihero. Who could? Seriously, if you only know Depp now, Google him then.

But newcomer Lulu-Mae Pears fits the bill as goody-two-shoes Allison, aching to take a walk on the wild side. There’s an effortlessness to her performance, whether she’s sinking into the splits or trilling heedless innuendos. Chad Saint Louis unleashes an astonishing set of pipes as Cry-Baby’s sidekick Dupree W. Dupree and Eleanor Walsh gives a hilariously unhinged turn as spurned love-interest Lenora Frigid.

There’s an eye-catching performance from Jazzy Phoenix as Cry-Baby’s pregnant cousin Pepper, bewailing the prospect of her child being born in jail: “What am I supposed to tell the possible fathers?” Elliot Allinson is also good as the leader of the “very straight and extremely narrow” fraternity of squares, who wants to claim Allison.

Things end happily. Too happily. The final number ironically suggests that “nothing bad” will ever, ever happen again in America’s future. Ha, bloody ha. That’s something to cry about at the curtain call.

Arcola Theatre, to April 12; arcolatheatre.com