From the country that brought us “No Sex Please, We’re British,” now comes the new musical, “Mrs. Henderson Presents,” which begins previews on the West End on February 9, prior to a February 16 opening.The show, which is based on a 2005 film starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, has serious concerns set as it is with Britain on a wartime footing. But the titillation comes from the fact that the revues Mrs. Henderson is presenting are of a sort that sends the censorious Lord Chamberlain into a tizzy. Fully nude beauties stand motionless in tableaux vivants at her Windmill Theatre, a morale boost for a public unnerved by German bombardiers and their boys going off to war. Martin Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for the Stephen Frears film, based his story on the real-life Windmill, which held forth from the 1930s to the 1960s and was a rite of passage for many young men.The new musical adaptation is by Terry Johnson, who won a Tony Award for a Broadway revival of “La Cage Aux Folles,” and who caused something of a sensation when his stage version of “The Graduate,” featured a briefly nude Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson. Choreographing is Andrew Wright, and the songs are by Don Black, Simon Chamberlain, and George Fenton. Tracie Bennett, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her turn as Judy Garland in “End of the Rainbow,” stars in the title role of an upper-class widow who partners with Vivian Van Damme, a Dutch Jewish émigré, played by Ian Bartholomew.“Mrs. Henderson Presents” received mixed notices for its try-out engagement in Bath, England, earning four stars from The Guardian’s Michael Billington. “The one thing the show’s creators have firmly grasped, like John Osborne in “The Entertainer,” is the alliance between patriotism and prurience as the Windmill’s famous static nudes are glimpsed in 1940 through the reassuring veil of the Union Jack.” Variety, however, called it “an indulgent love letter from British theaterland to itself” that puts a “sugary spin” on Henderson’s story while flipping the bird at “the stuffy moral guardians of the establishment.”The Brits, of course, are famous for thumbing their nose at their inherent puritanism. In “Noises Off,” now in a hit revival at the Roundabout, the farce within the show is titled, “Nothing On,” a bow to long-running West End comedies like “No Sex Please, We’re British,” “Halt, Who Goes Bare?”, and “Yes, We Have No Pyjamas.”Americans are not quite as susceptible — “No Sex” played for 16 years on the West End and lasted 16 performances on Broadway — but John Reid, the producer of “Mrs. Henderson Presents,” is looking to cross the pond if all goes well in London. He may have a leg up on box-office success here with a chorus line of lissome totally nude females, coupled with heart-warming war stories. Of course, it’s been more than four decades since the brief nude scene in “Hair” spurred a rush to the Biltmore Theatre. As a historical footnote, the Lord Chamberlain’s ability to censor British theater was abolished by an act of Parliament in July of 1968. Two months later, “Hair,” which had previously been denied a license unless it excised certain scenes, opened on the West End unexpurgated.
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