How do you turn a classic Hollywood western into West End musical fare? Add songs, many of Bruce Springsteen’s in this case, along with a few rounds of line dancing and a sizzling star in Billy Crudup. Still, it’s an odd experience initially as Thea Sharrock’s production switches from one brief filmic scene to the next, and the endeavour seems as wooden as the clapboard saloon-bar slats that comprise the handsome set.
As a piece of theatre, it finds its flow. As a debate play, though, it gathers a locomotive energy as it travels towards the showdown between Frank Miller (James Doherty), who is returning to this “dirty little village in the middle of nowhere”, and the marshal Will Kane (Crudup) who put him behind bars. That is mostly because of the uncanny and urgent relevance of this 1952 film about a community working out (or rather, squirming out of) its civic responsibilities around institutional wrongdoing.
