One of the mid-range characters in this flawed 1998 musical is a James Dean wannabe, convinced he will one day hit 150mph on his ramshackle motorbike. He reminds me a lot of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director/producer Bill Kenwright in their dogged commitment to this show.
Lloyd Webber and lyricist Jim Steinman uproot Mary Hayley Bell's story of three English children who mistake an escaped convict for the returned Jesus, and plonk it down in the hardscrabble, segregated, American Deep South in the late Fifties.
A simple fable is suddenly loaded with new baggage - race, religious mania, rock 'n' roll and the birth of the teenager - which it is not substantial enough to bear.
They also try to have things both ways. God-bothering kids are good, snake-handling evangelists bad, and no one is really racist except the nasty old police.
Sexual awakening is a wonderful thing, but not if you're a naive 15-year-old called Swallow. Oh, and there's a little bit of Jesus in every jailbird. Maybe.
The net result is an unashamedly sentimental but sadly confused work. And although WDTW contains some of Lloyd Webber's most naggingly catchy music, even the genre-hopping score fails to cohere.
You can't resist the remorseless tearjerker No Matter What or the sweet title song, but the rock pastiches are substandard, and the upbeat pop anthems sung by the ensemble of children jarringly anachronistic.
Kenwright at least stages the show with winning simplicity so the audience don't leave humming the sets, as they did in the original West End staging. He has a sweet-voiced and fairly convincing Swallow in Claire Marlowe, and two thoroughly endearing moppets, Emma Hopkins and Laurence Belcher, as her siblings.
Tim Rogers has a strong voice but mostly acts with his biceps and scowling brows as the convict. But a part called The Man was always going to be a little underwritten.
The ensemble is tight, the band good. But I came out of the theatre with two things lingering in my head.
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One was the unshakeable title song. The other was the image of Hayley Mills and Alan Bates in Bryan Forbes's 1961 film of WDTW, a balanced match of story and medium that this over-reaching musical simply can't equal.
Whistle Down The Wind
