JADAR

★★★☆☆

With the Tories terrorising Manchester with their party conference (emphasis on party), we escaped to Salford, only for the city to be invaded by something even more sinister, insidious and [insert any horror movie title here]: Tony Blair.

TONY! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera], like TONY! The Blair Musical before it, is a musical comedy about disgraced former Prime Minister Tony Blair – by Harry Hill and Steve Brown.

After 12 years of Tory terror – with five self-serving Prime Ministers, each worse than the last – parodying Blair (“Labour’s most successful premier,” as the opening song reminds us) seems an odd choice. Perhaps it’s escapism of sorts, in which we reminisce about better days (it’s relative!).

The musical begins with Tony on his death bed, with the ensemble (all dressed in New Labour suits and red ties) deriding him. Tony (Jack Whittle) dismisses their criticisms and takes us back to the very beginning: his birth. The birth sequence is hilarious: Jack’s head pops out from a black curtain below Blair’s mother’s legs, followed by the body of a soft baby doll.

Suddenly, Blair is 8, and then he’s off to university, and then he’s an MP. It’s a whistle-stop tour of Blair’s life, ticking off all of the most important things: meeting Cherie Blair (Olivier Awards nominee Tori Burgess), being moulded by Peter Mandelson (Howard Samuels), New Labour’s early success, and, of course, the war (Which one? All four!).

The musical’s comedy is madcap and slapstick, each scene essentially a sketch. It’s very Harry Hill.

This is not a sympathetic portrayal of Blair – or anybody. They do Gordon Brown (Phil Sealey) particularly dirty. Even the “People’s Princess”, Diana Spencer (Emma Jay Thomas), is parodied; she says something along the lines of, “There were three people in this marriage, not including my seven.”

The acting is top-notch. Whittle embodies the smarmy Blair (his face must ache from all that Cheshire cat-smiling) except for his looks: he’s much too attractive. Nobody should be getting the hots for Tony Blair. (But as attractive as he is, you probably don’t want him spitting carrots at you, so try to avoid the first few rows…)

Samuels steals the show as the conniving Peter Mandelson and Dick Cheney, each portrayed as the mastermind behind their respective administrations, Tony Blair and George Bush their charismatic but empty-headed, floppy-armed puppets.

Surprisingly, the musical’s politics are not paper-thin; for a silly satire, TONY! surprisingly has nuance and even asks the audience to think semi-critically about Blair. The final song, in which Blair reminds the presumably anti-Blair British audience that we voted him back in even after the Iraq war (so who are the real monsters?), is excellent. But it’s not quite that simplistic: the alternative to Labour was a stale Conservative party, with a weak leader, whose MPs were also supportive of the Iraq War. Labour remained the lesser evil.

Further, portraying Blair and Bush as ambitious buffoons and thus malleable masks the reality that they were self-serving, war-mongering monsters.

The music numbers, which are essentially Harry Hill and Steve Brown pretending to be Gilbert and Sullivan writing for Broadway, are pleasant enough; they are lyrically sharp and pretty funny. Gordon Brown gets a number about macro economics, Tony and Cherie do a Liverpudlian tango, and Tony leads the hilarious albeit obvious final number,’The Whole Wide World is run by assholes’.

The more you remember or know about the Blair years, the better. I wasn’t born until 1999 so some of the references were lost on me but I’m a political junkie so I was familiar with most of the characters and topics.

TONY! is silly, satirical and intentionally unserious. I didn’t learn anything new but I did have lots of fun (however, I can’t say the same for the poor people covered in sexy Blair’s saliva-soaked chewed pieces of carrot).

TONY! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera] runs at The Lowry (Quays Theatre) until October 7, before wrapping up its UK tour at the Liverpool Playhouse, where it runs from October 10 to 14.

Photo: Mark Senior