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	Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (venue website) Theatre 1-11, 13-18, 20-25 Aug, 6:15pm-7:15pm Reviewed by Richard Stamp
Free and unticketed. No pre-booking required.  Recommended for age 16+ only.

It took a certain amount of chutzpah to stride into this show, clutching my reviewer’s notebook in my hand. After all, it’s the real-life tale of how Peter Michael Marino’s musical version of Desperately Seeking Susan – with a soundtrack from Blondie! – closed after just four weeks on London’s West End. And if you believe the pre-show publicity, the critics who savaged Marino’s musical were very much to blame.

But that, it turns out, is a bit of a red herring; as Marino makes disarmingly clear, the musical he’d made his life’s work was doomed to fail before a single drop of ink fell from the critics’ pens.  The story of how he reached that point is as terrifying as it’s entertaining.  It’s a tale of artistic conflict and creative bravado, of the corrosive power of an excess of money, and of how shockingly quickly a guaranteed success can melt down into a quivering failure.

Marino cuts an energetic, restless, even frenetic figure on stage.  He’s clearly still passionate about his vision for the musical – and based on the quick run-through he offers at the start of the show, he’s every right to be.  As his narrative continues, a mournfully cynical tale begins to unfold, of how he lost control of his own creative work and how a warring director and choreographer turned his outburst of upbeat showmanship into a dourly unappealing farce.  It’s a fascinating insight into the true workings of the West End, and it’s to Marino’s credit that he tells such a powerful story while keeping the laugh count high.

Less successfully, there’s a lengthy chunk in the middle which dissects the experience of an American in London – with a particular focus on how perplexing British idiomatic expressions can be.  It’s funny and respectful, but it’s not exactly ground-breaking, and at times it was strangely at odds with the thrust of Marino’s narrative.  He complains that New Jersey references were excised from his show because they’d confuse a London audience – and then, apparently without irony, goes on to note how bamboozled he was when a colleague talked about finding a “hole in the wall”.

This show’s at its best when Marino skips the observational comedy, and simply tells his story.  He plays it for laughs, but there’s a real poignancy to it as well – and I’d have liked to have heard a little more of the darker side.  As it is, he skips quickly over the worst of it, before moving on to a triumphantly table-turning ending.  In the end then, I wasn’t seeking the exit to this enthralling storyteller’s monologue; on the contrary, I just wished he’d drawn me just a little further in.