Beautiful Little Fool at Southwark Playhouse Borough review: unsubtle and trivialising

The faults of a mediocre artwork seem worse when its subject is an artistic giant: it’s twice as bad if it’s two giants, and somehow worse still if the work in question is a musical. This banal meander through the lives of Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald is a case in point: it’s unsubtle and trivialising. Michael Greif’s awkward production features a cast of five and a band of four, and just about every cocktail-clinking, writer’s-blocking cliché you could wave a volume of short stories at.

Composer and lyricist Hannah Corneau, an accomplished American musical theatre actress who’s played Elphaba in Wicked and Elsa in Frozen, claims to have written 14 of the show’s 17 undistinguished pop-rock songs in a week. Maybe she should have taken a bit longer before bringing in Greif (a five-time Tony-nominee), and writer Mona Mansour to flesh out a book.