Review: Casablanca – The Gin Joint Cut, Theatre Dejazet, Paris

Woody Allen set the benchmark pretty high for comedic love letters to Humphrey Bogart when he wrote Play It Again, Sam. But this playful production has a pretty good crack at both sending up and swooning over the Bogart/Bergman double act, cramming all the action and lots of laughs too into a tight hour.

Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut, written by Morag Fullarton, was first performed on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2011, but happened to be playing in a beautiful old theatre in Paris when I was there this week. Coincidentally I saw it the night after I saw Woody Allen’s latest movie appearance in Fading Gigolo, where he also wryly references Bogie when he says towards the end “this could have been the start of a beautiful relationship”.

The Gin Joint Cut cleverly plays fast and loose with the original storyline. Three actors, Gavin Mitchell, Clare Waugh and Barnaby Power play all the parts and the premise is the old play-within-a-play gag. The trio are performing their version of Casablanca all set within Rick’s Bar and anxious that they might be about to get their big movie break because a casting director is in the audience – cue lots of mugging and spontaneous song-and-dance routines that I certainly don’t recall from the original film. 

Mitchell – who this autumn revives his role as Boaby The Barman in Still Game for 12 nights at the 12,000-seater Glasgow Hydro, could certainly make a decent living as a Bogie lookalike. He has the machismo manner, the heft and the curled lip all sorted. He is also a great physical comedian, playing the fact that his chain-smoking hero is not allowed to smoke onstage for maximum laughs, at one point stubbing out his invisible cigarette with exquisite precision in an invisible ash tray.

Clare Waugh is also lots of fun as both leather-coated Nazi and Ingrid Bergman, while Barnaby Power does the sweatiest, heaviest lifting, taking on umpteen other parts, sometimes more than one at a time (appearing in view as one, then voicing the other out of sight). 

The script is peppered with nice facts about the original film too – Dooley Wilson, who sang As Time Goes By, was a drummer rather than a pianist, so banged a fake keyboard while the real one was played by someone else. The budget doesn’t quite run to a pianist onstage – “Sam” is played by a small doll which Bogie intermittently chats to.

It probably helps if you know the original movie, but so many of the lines and scenes have become iconic that anyone with the slightest interest in cinema will spot most of the references. The performance ends with a brief Gene Kelly tribute which is almost as good as the previous 60 minutes. What next for the team? Singing In The Rain – The Watering Can Cut?

Casablanca: The Gin Joint Cut is on at Theatre Dejazet, Paris until April 26. Details and tickets here.

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