31 January, so… the anniversary of the demise of Guy Fawkes? Bit obvious, maybe. How about Ham the Astrochimp going into space?
No, because, in 1996, this was the opening night of The Fields of Ambrosia, a West End musical about… a travelling executioner.
Yes, Jonas Candide drives around the Deep South in a colourful van with a portable electric chair in the back, visits penitentiaries, and despatches wrong ’uns. And sings to them, comfortingly, about where they’re off to: “the fields of ambrosia, where everyone knows ya”.
No, really.
You may not be surprised to hear that it closed after 23 performances, but its Wikipedia entry may cause you to ask why, if the New York Times called it a “new kind of musical” with
the essence of black comedy … violence, sex, romance and sentiment
Well, let’s look at what the NYT actually said when it reviewed the first production in New Jersey a couple of years earlier, shall we…?
Back to London, and Benedict Nightingale in the Times opened with:
This American musical isn’t quite another ‘Springtime for Hitler’, though there were moments in the first scene when I thought it might be
The ‘story’ — if that isn’t too dignified a word for what was laid out before the paying punters — is that Jonas has happily despatched scores of men, and is suddenly asked to off a woman called Gretchen. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
Well, wouldn’t you know it? It turns out she’s beautiful, and — even if her last sugar daddy did come to an unfortunate end — not really a bad person AT ALL. Or as one of the prison warders puts it, “I figure your ass is too good to fry”.
Yes, it was a startling, taste-free, unhinged, tone-deaf mess. And I know this because I saw it. I love bad art.
A digression
My commitment to trash is such that I even saw Leonardo The Musical, which had been financed by the Republic of Nauru’s guano deposits, and centred around a famous painter, not noted in life for his heterosexuality, doinking a married woman called Lisa whose portrait he is working on.
That was spectaular. Also, someone who had recently become an ex-friend was in Fields of Ambrosia, so…
Anyway…
This show was gloriously stupid. Or, as the Independent review put it, it:
left this critic weak with bliss as it trampled over good taste and political correctness like a herd of bullocks.
It might have worked, as Nightingale pointed out:
But don’t take his word for it; take mine. When one inmate, Jimmy, is dragged into the back of the van and raped by two other prisoners, he emerges to sing the words
If it ain’t one thing it’s another
No, really.
It wasn’t all jaw-droppingly horrific, though. It was also extremely funny. Unintentionally. At the climax of the first act, for example, the man who’s about to get done in shouts to the executioner:
Do it, boy! Fry me while I’m hot!
Sadly, not much remains of it. If you look very hard, you might track down the original cast recording, and you can hear the title track on YouTube:
You can even — as I discovered to my considerable and pleasant surprise when I started reading up on this — see the trailer for the 1970 Stacy Keach film The Traveling Executioner on which it’s based, which I had not previously heard of, and which I now very much want to watch in full:
…or we can all just enjoy some more quotes from the reviews of the musical:
Morally unappealing … disgusting and titillating (Standard)
All very strange … As if everyone has had any sense of good taste, or indeed morality, surgically removed (Telegraph)
But perhaps the last word should go to Benedict Nightingale:
…or, no: maybe his Independent counterpart, Paul Taylor:
But maybe we should turn to that ‘whisky doctor’, Mike Fenton Stevens. When I posted about this on Twitter, he expressed his sympathy for the show’s producers:
The opening night was like the opening night of Springtime For Hitler. But without the ticket sales.
And, finally, if you’d prefer to put all this behind you, you can still find out about Ham the Astrochimp…
I’m not judging. Each to their own, I say.
