Calamity Jane review – mighty pretty music but this western could be wilder

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The 1953 film Calamity Jane is quick on the draw. Doris Day’s romcom western gets under way with lickety-split rhythm and irresistible whip-crack-away refrains. This stage adaptation takes its sweet time to get going, with a bit of tomfoolery from a grizzled, banjo-twanging barfly and the denizens of Deadwood opening with a ballad, The Black Hills of Dakota.

That is indicative of a show that ambles through the same storyline, adding half an hour (including a handful of extra songs) to its running time. Some of the material passes by like tumbleweed but the song Men! features Calamity ribbing the opposite sex, redressing the barrage of feminine ideals she faces in the film. Another catchy addition, Careless With the Truth, reinforces the frontierswoman’s taste for self-mythologising.

The stage musical dates from 1961 and this production was first mounted by Nikolai Foster at the Watermill in 2014. It gives Carrie Hope Fletcher, in the lead role, far more female company than Day had on screen where one running gag finds the saloon’s proprietor addressing “gentlemen and, er, gentlemen”.

A Deadwood peopled by jovial actor-musicians would no doubt have suited the intimate Watermill yet it often seems devoid of tension in this vast space. Matthew Wright’s attractive sepia set design adds a second proscenium arch towards the back for the barroom’s stage, resulting in an extra sense of distance from some scenes.

Seren Sandham-Davies as Katie Brown in Calamity Jane.

As in the film, the most affecting romance for Calamity does not involve her sparring partner Wild Bill Hickok (Vinny Coyle) or her unrequited love for a lieutenant (Luke Wilson). Instead, it is her bond with Katie Brown (Seren Sandham-Davies), the aspiring singer who pitches up in Deadwood pretending to be a big Chicago revue star (one of several concealed or mistaken identities in the story).

Calamity and Katie’s duet, A Woman’s Touch, in which they spruce up their shack, accentuates the mutual attraction, the pair clasping hands as they first sing the title words. Less is made of Secret Love as a queer anthem but the big numbers by Sammy Fain (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics) are sung well and staged with elan even if Fletcher’s first appearance, riding an upright piano as a stagecoach, is not presented to maximum impact. Swaggering yet brooding, flipping the bird one minute and jabbing out an elbow the next, she is in fine raconteur mode as Calamity, especially on Just Blew in from the Windy City.

’Tis Harry I’m Plannin’ to Marry, performed by Molly-Grace Cutler as Adelaid Adams, benefits from a staging that pokes some fun at the object of her affection. Elsewhere, the show dances more awkwardly around its wild west cum 1950s gender politics. It excises racial slurs from the songs and script – changing the “sweetheart of the Sioux” outfit that Hickok wears as a forfeit to a Queen of England costume instead – yet essentially writes Native Americans out of the story.

The wild west trappings range from red, white and blue roundel bunting to co-director Nick Winston’s fun hoedown choreography. Bullets are part of the percussion for Catherine Jayes’ spirited orchestrations but the script (adapted by Charles K Freeman from James O’Hanlon’s screenplay) gets bogged down in exposition and expands the character of Francis Fryer (a comical Isaac Savage) when it is the principal relationships that would benefit from development. But if this musical has a generally unadventurous, even cautious air, there are enough bulletproof songs to keep it wheeling.