The Car Man dance production. Music arranged by Terry Davies after the Rodion Shchedrin Carmen Suite and other sources. Book and choreography by Matthew Bourne. This is the 2015 revival with staging by Etta Murfit at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London (which updated the earlier version of the show published in DVD). Stars Christopher Trenfield (Luca), Zizi Strallen (Lana), Dominic North (Angelo), Kate Lyons (Rita), Alan Vincent (Dino) and the following residents of Harmony, USA: Cordelia Braithwaite, Tom Clark, Danny Collins, Pia Driver, Glenn Graham, Nicole Kabera, Katrina Lyndon, Andrew Monaghan, Leon Moran, Danny Reubens, Katie Webb, and Daniel Wright. Set and costume design by Lez Brotherston; lighting design by Chris Davey; sound design by Paul Groothius. Directed for TV by Ross MacGibbon. Released 2017, disc has 48/24 LPCM stereo sound. Grade: B+
The Carmen music gets this show off to a fast start, but the story has nothing to do with the opera. This is a murder thriller loosely inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice story that was made into several famous movies. In the really old days, the postman would ring the doorbell to be sure you got your mail. If he missed you on his first past, he would ring again on his way back to the post office. Here this means that if you at first get away with murder, you will surely get your just reward when the postman returns.
Matthew Bourne sets this in about 1957 in a hick town in the USA. I was growing up then in Harmony, so this was a real nostalgia trip. I worked at the gas station (on the two-lane “bypass” around Harmony) pumping gas, changing oil, and fixing flats. Right next door was the Kentwood Grill, our “drive-in” hamburger joint, the only place in town visited by all the girls. So I was working at the center of gossip for the whole county, which made up for all those skinned knuckles. Now the crowd at the Kentwood did not look as tough as the dancers in our first screenshot below, but this is for sure how we wanted to look:
Here’s Dino played by Alan Vincent, who looks exactly like the owner of the Kentwood Grill:
And there were plenty of drifters like Luca (Christopher Trenfield) who couldn’t stand to wind cones at the textile mill or make sawdust at the furniture factory:
Next below meet Lana (Zizi Strallen), Dino’s young wife. Lana looks exactly like the older sister who was growing up right across the street from us. I tried to get her to go out with me, but she was always dating some mysterious older guy. (The wife at the Kentwood Grill did not look like Lana; that poor wife’s beauty had long since gone down the drain at the dish-washing machine.)
Dwight Eisenhower was President, and everything sexual (other than the sweater-girl fashions) was viciously repressed. For us, the most exciting thing that would happen all year was to see what the new model Chevrolet would look like. What you see below was not the reality, but a fantasy of hick-town life:
This is more like it. Everybody smoked. (Stopping smoking later was my greatest achievement in life.)
In the summer it was hot as hell. There was no air conditioning except maybe our movie house, where the air sometimes was cooled by a structure the size of a building itself that evaporated enormous amounts of dripping water:
Below on the left is Rita (Kate Lyons), who looks exactly like the younger sister who lived across the street from us and eventually became a librarian. On the right is Angelo (Dominic North) the sensitive misfit guy trying to figure out his sexuality. We had people like this, but we just thought they were shy. I knew that homosexuality had existed, but I thought it had died out with the ancient Greeks:
Lana is hot too:
Trouble ahead:
After all these years, I finally get to see what a girl’s bra looked like in 1957. To see such a thing was quite impossible at the time, although everyone knew the effect created was more false than true. Bourne’s characters are a bit older than when I was a car man. By the time I was as old as Luca, I had escaped Harmony and was in the U.S. Army defending snowbanks in German forests from the Russians. Sorry, back to our story: now the trouble we expected is happening:
Lana and the Drifter kill Dino:
And frame Angelo:
Angelo is in prison. Rita visits and explains to him in a flashback how Dino was murdered:
Now Luca and Lana are living it up on Dino’s estate:
Until Angelo escapes from prison and leaves his calling card:
It’s Fight Night at the garage. Soon the postman will call again, but I’ll not completely spoil it for you:
The era depicted here was, of course, not nearly as raunchy as the dancing in this show. The dancing was created to excite audiences in the 21st century, who view everything through the lenses of the Sexual Revolution and the Sexual Revelation. The folks in England get to laugh at the antics of a bunch of American morons. And the Americans get to fantasize The Way We Wished We Had Been.
If there was dialogue to match, this would be an R or maybe X-rated movie. It’s right at the boundary of what we cover in this fine-arts website, but we do all the Matthew Bourne shows as modern dance titles sold by Presto Classical as well as Amazon. The orchestra is all strings plus slam-bang-ding-pop percussion whipped along mercilessly by Brett Morris to drive the dance action. Ross MacGibbon’s video pace is probably too fast, but who cares — it’s only 90 minutes and you’re supposed to feel exhausted at the end. The plot has gobs of holes, but the frantic action plugs them all. Production values are high-quality grunge — the cars even have the steering wheels on the left like they make ‘um in the US of A. I’ll give it a B+.
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