Oh Yes I Am!: A Musical
Bread and Roses Theatre, London, UK, November 24, 2022
Reviewed by Gavin Brook
Hector Hanley, OBE and retired pantomime dame, is preparing to regale an adoring audience at an unspecified location with anecdotes about his life. The place, we discover, is an old people’s home where Hanley is a patient, lost in a world of intruding memories, oblivious to the nurse who tends him. As his mind relives the formative moments of his life and career, the past bleeds into the present and each episode adds to a fractured mosaic of life and love as recalled by a person with dementia.
With songs by James Cleeve and Mike Stocks, Oh Yes I Am! is a musical comedy that is unusual in its subject matter but is executed with beguiling deftness and sincerity. While dementia might sound like a heavy subject, in the hands of Mike Stocks (book and lyrics), it is handled with grace and a lightness of touch that nonetheless shines a light on the experience of degenerative illness in a way that is humane and more often than not, touchingly funny.
The two actors, who are rarely offstage for the show’s 70-minute running time, carry the material with aplomb. The two complement one another in age, with Kevin West’s golden-years Hector playing younger iterations of the character in flashback sequences interspersed into the present day. Co-star Sam Denia, among a range of other roles too numerous to mention, plays Hector’s charming young rival and love interest, Dicky. It is no understatement to say that Denia’s performance provides a masterclass in character acting as it single-handedly creates a supporting cast of more than a dozen immediately identifiable and memorable characters.
James Cleeve’s score which flows invisibly in and out of scenes, has echoes of Cole Porter and is perfectly suited to the world of the pantomime dame. Amusing pastiches of pop music and Christmas carols also provided memorable highlights. Oh Yes I Am! proved to be an entertaining and affecting piece of theater due in no small part to the exceptional performances of its lead actors and to its smartly constructed book that offers graceful levity and humor to the subject matter.
