From 9 to 5 to Pretty Woman to Back to the Future, musical stage adaptations of the 80s biggest films have been in steady supply for over a decade, adding fresh songs to classic stories with varying success. An Officer and a Gentleman, playing this week at The New Theatre, joins this cohort with an additional quandary - it’s a jukebox musical, gathering a bouquet of Blondie, Bon Jovi, Madonna, Foreigner and many more to emphasize the beats of its plot. Does this work? Far better than it should, mostly down to a very talented cast and the sheer serotonin blast these familiar hits deliver. But you can’t help wondering why on earth this show exists, or if it is a relevant production for this moment in time?
The plot concerns a scrappy young naval officer candidate called Zack Mayo, played by Richard Gere in film and a very talented Luke Baker here. Mayo has a dead mom and a deadbeat dad (Tim Rogers), and wants to make something of himself, but to do so he must battle the trials of initial training, a ruthless drill sergeant and his own demons.
Arriving in Pensacola, Florida for training, Zack befriends his fellow candidate, sweet-but-troubled country boy Sid Worley (Paul French, perfectly pitched). Just as soon as the boys are warned not to get involved with the local factory girls, who are desperate for a new life married to an Officer, Zack meets Paula Pokrifi (Georgia Lennon, excellent). Paula works at the factory alongside her mother, but dreams of becoming a nurse and shares Zack’s deep ambition. A passionate romance ensues.
The film, which opened in 1982, is a deeply patriotic, traditional coming of age tale, with bombastic high notes and Springsteen-esque working class realism (well, Hollywood-realism). Here, the show can’t always decide how gritty versus sugar-spun it wants to be. Musical numbers are elaborate, technicolor flights of fancy, such as a pink suited homage to Marilyn Monroe during 'Material Girl’ and cheesy, Chippendales-inspired gyrating during 'Working for the Weekend'. Several numbers also pick up and drop their songs over the course of a scene, weaving in dialogue in between. It’s a creative use of the music, which mostly works. But the show is prone to intense tonal whiplash, as it abruptly veers out of goofy eighties fever dream into heavier topics like suicide, sexism, and parental abandonment. Forget falling in love over the course of a song, Paula and Zack’s relationship, saved by the actors remarkable chemistry, goes from zero to one hundred over the course of a single verse. There’s multiple well-meaning numbers about female empowerment that were sometimes moving but mostly fell a bit flat.
The best adaptations of classic work reproduce its flavour not as it was, but as we remember it. Certain lines in this should have also been edited to give their desired effect. Sergeant Foley, in a captivating performance by Jamal Kane Crawford, has some graphic and homophobic lines that would’ve landed lightly for an eighties audience, but hit with a thud now, and some of the casual objectification of the female characters in Zack and Sid’s remarks had curdled in the past few decades.
Ultimately, the plot doesn’t quite come together into more than a predictable sum of its parts. The profundity of the story has inevitably faded in the forty years, trip across the pond, and cut-and-paste musical-isation of it. But, with all that said - the acting is so chipper, and the songs are classics for a reason, the choreography is captivating, and everytime I wanted to disengage, the show won me back over. It’s not a great musical, but I had a truly great evening, and I’d recommend it for that alone.