The musical stage was
rocked to its foundations – or brought
quivering to its knees depending on
one’s view – by the appearance of Zipp!
an evening of a hundred musicals performed
by a cast of five. The fons et origo
of this creation was the erstwhile
parliamentarian and teddy bear aficionado
Gyles "Jumpers" Brandreth,
a product of Oxford, media larceny and
now, bewildering though it is to imagine,
a CBS News reporter.
Brandreth is clearly
a creature of the stage, a kind of demi-phantom
of the musical operetta, and was once
in fact director of the Oxford Theatre
Festival. Zipp, a contraction of the
famous Disney song I’m too indolent
to type in full, has played with great
success up and down the land from Edinburgh
to Guildford and most stops in between.
In modern parlance it’s been workshopped
along the way and we have here, unveiled
in 2004, its final incarnation. Think
of Bruckner editions and then think
of Zipp – and then think again.
Greatest Hits flash
by, a hundred of them, and all piano
accompanied. It’s a kind of accelerated
learning curve, a high-speed montage,
presided over by Brandreth’s twinkle-eyed,
sloe-footed (or is that the wrong way
round) master of ceremonies and occasional
hoofer, larynx tester and closet transvestite
(please see the back of the booklet).
He’s breathlessly avuncular throughout,
spicing up audience reaction with some
risqué banter as well some leering
interplay with a stalls damsel called
Brenda. The cast is with him all the
way, bringing gusto to the George Melly-isms
of You got the right key
and the Lehrer-doffing The Vatican
Rag (the former a double entendre
vaudeville number surely, not from a
musical, and the latter an imperishable
moment no one can do if he’s not Lehrer).
Julie Andrews is gently mocked, Noel
Coward tweaked and – the most hilarious
of all – Lord Lloyd Webber done over
with a drum machine in an eleven minute
Tribute. Done over is not quite right
– the vexatious cast bring such verve
to the proceedings that one capitulates
with shuddering pleasure. Curiously
enough one of the best lines in the
whole show ("Byron, drag your leg
over here") raises barely a titter
– the good burghers of Croydon being
notoriously resistant to arty allusions
in their camp.
So if your yen is to
hear a gay I Remember It Well in
precisely 1.02 or The Doctor
dusted down in twenty-seven seconds
or maybe even an intoxicatingly silly
series of sequences then you can join
the audience at the Ashcroft Theatre
for a Porter and Sondheim-rich fest
of frolics, presided über alles
by the Judy Garland-loving, pertly bosomed
Gyles "Call Me Madam" Brandreth.
Jonathan Woolf
Gyles Brandreth 
