“What was I thinking when I made this deal?” So sings Holly Martins (Sam Underwood) towards the end of the new musical adaptation of “The Third Man.” Indeed. As it turns out, the mystery at the heart of the show is not the expected “Whatever happened to Harry Lime?” – the man of the title – but what possessed a creative team as distinguished as director Trevor Nunn and bookwriter Christopher Hampton to imagine that what Carol Reed’s still-astonishing classic film needed was to be taken offscreen and planted onstage with added songs. The dismaying production provides no answer.
The opening is ominous in completely the wrong way. Yes, we’re still in Vienna in 1947 but it feels like a failure to resort to a voice-over to explain necessary information about how, in the wake of the war, the city has been divided up into sectors under the control of warring nations. The storytelling, it’s clear, is going to be bald.
Plotwise, almost nothing has changed. Pulp Westerns writer Martins arrives penniless in the city only to discover that his old friend Harry Lime (Simon Bailey) has died, oddly unconvincingly, in a car accident while crossing the road. Puzzled by the reactions and stern warnings of Harry’s alternately grand and malevolent friends, not to mention the police interest, he sets about attempting to solve the mystery.
Having scored more than a hundred films, composer George Fenton knows how to make atmospheric underscoring count. He ratchets up moments of tension with tremolando strings and, for the first-act climax reveal of Harry, borrows four fortissimo bars that echo the film’s celebrated, chart-topping zither theme (which sold an estimated 40 million copies worldwide). And, it being Vienna, a song of regret is presented in the rhythm of a Viennese waltz.
The only major shift is to take advantage of songs and turn Harry’s girlfriend, the remote Anna Schmidt, from an actor into a cabaret singer. Natalie Dunne gets to perform two of them efficiently which might have yielded dividends had the songs been suitably pointed, unexpected or exciting. Unfortunately, they are none of the above, sounding more like early rejects from “Cabaret” with Kander & Ebb-like vamps, which even Jason Carr’s crisp, nicely Weill-inflected, sax-and-muted-trumpet orchestrations cannot save.
The lyrics throughout, co-written with the equally experienced Don Black, are almost routinely mis-stressed, lurching between the bland, like “When will Vienna ever be Vienna again?”; the insipid, like “Where there’s music there’s a ray of light”; or the lumpily banal plot exposition as when Holly stands at Harry’s grave and sings: “So he is dead?/ I can’t get this out of my head.”
Overall, the songs feel shapeless with uncertainty growing as to where choruses lie and, more worrying, failing to make a case as to why they are replacing dialogue.
Why, for example, does Callaway, played by a nicely controlled Edward Baker-Duly identically dressed as in the film, sing Harry Lime’s catalogue of horrors when speaking would be more effective? The list, the center of the plot, should chill the blood but the song is merely anodyne. It’s typical of a score and a production that fatally cannot make up its mind as to why moments are either spoken or sung. Holly sometimes informs us where he is and what he’s doing with speech; at other times he delivers near identical material in song.
Putting in a mosaic floor, Paul Farnsworth lends ideally disheveled, old-world charm to the Menier Chocolate Factory’s stage, and his open space gives free reign to Emma Chapman’s excellent, steeply angled, film-noir lighting. She paints less with light than shadows. With the audience on three sides, her lighting and Nunn’s handling of action mean the numerous chases are notably effective. But even those sequences feel at odd with a production that cannot make up its mind about its prevailing style. One minute it’s expressionist, then literal, then the actors are suddenly miming opening doors or pretending to play the zither.
Bailey is suitably bumptious but effortful as Harry, but the drama suffers most with the underwritten and over-emoting Holly and Anna. Permanently overwrought, Holly seems not like a sympathetically hollowed-out man but an overgrown, crying kid. Both actors offer up their feelings, but neither the script nor Nunn’s direction create even the vaguest sense of connection, much less chemistry between them. As a result, it’s well-nigh impossible to work up sympathy for them, let alone excitement.
There’s a reason there are so few musical thrillers: It takes longer to sing something than to say it, and slowing everything down is the last thing you want in a thriller where taut action is of the essence. These songs do nothing to tighten, much less drive, the proceedings. Graham Greene’s original story and screenplay create gripping layers of subtle emotion from doubt through desire to disappointment. Here, everything is loudly displayed but never earned. A show already almost devoid of dramatic tension winds up feeling episodic, limp and painfully long.
