LILY ALLEN PRESENTS WEST END GIRL – LIVE: REVIEW
LILY ALLEN
Tik Tok Entertainment Centre, Sydney, October 25
IN HER BRUTAL narrative album of marital discord and disaster, West End Girl, Lily Allen has the perfect vehicle to merge several elements of her career and appeal into something new. There’s the frank feminist who bridged aspiring-cynic teens with seasoned-cynic adults and the hook-tastic pop singer who made that sound like a hoot; the hedonist-who-tried-it-all and the romantic-despite-it-all; the latter-day stage actor of other people’s words and the life-long diarist who will share her truth.
So turning last year’s record firstly into a small theatre creation and then into this year’s arena pop show – to which you can add a solid bit of sisterhood bonding over male treachery, with women near me regularly yelling out affirmations (“you’re too good for him … get him Lils”) and condemnations (“he’s a cunt” and, to the marital interloper Madeline, “fuck you bitch”) – didn’t just make sense, it was excitingly different for an artist who has not always found live performance a particularly interesting exercise.
(For those wanting the career before-West End Girl Lily Allen, they got the satisfaction of hits during the cello sextet support act. A raft of her best-known songs were played with the lyrics projected on to screens, and singing broke out everywhere. It wasn’t particularly entertaining but did make for a communal and warm half hour, like a giant karaoke bar at a Bridgerton party.)
The theatre-basis for the show is clear, from its fixed-points blocking that has Allen stretched out on a chaise longue for Sleepwalking or tossing sex toys from a rumpled bed in 4chan Stan to a handful of other props (among them a full fridge, bed, rotary telephone and a pink apron emblazoned with “cuck”) and Allen staying in character and not talking between songs, and you can see how impactful it would be in a small room.
But scaled up for arenas it feels more static than dynamic, stiff in motion when the music glides, not helped by the choice to eschew a wireless body microphone of the sort musical theatre performers use, which would have freed her hands and allowed more substantial “acting” of this kitchen sink-meets-fuck-pad drama. To stick instead to a handheld microphone mixed the message that this was a piece of theatre not a pop concert, something blurred further when Nonmonogamummy was performed in concert mode with a microphone stand.
Flipping that, the use of taped sounds in lieu of a band and backing vocalists –to take away the concert feel, you hope, rather than cut down costs – feels odd when that fixed element still gave us a bottom-heavy mix that saw her first almost drowned out on the story-setting West End Girl and Ruminating, and after that often absorbed into the sound. Consequently, the fact she is probably singing live became almost irrelevant.
There is real potential for a show that isn’t just leaning into but fully embracing the theatre of this storyline, and given the good notices she has had for her straight acting roles in recent years, Allen is more than capable. But this halfway house undersells that.
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Lily Allen plays:
Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, October 28-29
RAC Arena, Perth, November 1
A version of this review ran originally in The Sydney Morning Herald
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