SHOW SYNOPSIS | The music and lyrics of “Blitz!”, by Lionel Bart combine to recapture London’s East End in World War II. Underground shelters with lights winking at distant detonations, anti-aircraft beams sweeping the savaged sky, sirens, smoke and splintering glass, all twang half-forgotten strings in the hearts of Londoners who lived through it, and present a vivid picture to the generation young enough to have escaped it.
The story is projected through the personality of a Jewish Momma, Mrs. Blitztein who rules her pickled herring stall, her family, and her crumbling fortunes with salty hand and tongue. Her pitch, in Petticoat Lane, adjoins Alfred Locke’s fruit stall and her hostility to Hitler only narrowly surpasses the unrelenting war she wages on Alfred. We first meet them during an air-raid in the Bank Underground Station when the spicily original and cleverly realised “Tell Him-Tell Her” employs Carol (Mrs. Blitztein’s youngest daughter) and Georgie (Alfred’s son) as “go-betweens” conveying the insults their parents scorn to deliver personally. Inevitably Carol falls in love with Georgie. Mrs. Blitztein’s matriarchal heart is further outraged when her eldest son Harry returns on leave with a Goy ‘pick-up’. Momma and Elsie (Harry’s ex-girlfriend) join forces against this extra enemy invasion but Momma refuses to be daunted because “that’s what Hitler wants” and leads the neighbours into the stirring “Be What You Wanna Be”. The Act ends with Carol blinded in an air-raid and Harry deserting from the Army. Mrs. Blitztein stumbles away to rally her personal defences. Act Two opens with Carol singing “Far Away” (one of the show’s most haunting numbers) and the return of the Evacuees affords a welcome reprise of “We’re Going To The Country”. Georgie returns embittered from the front giving Momma (who overhears his “Who Wants To Settle down?”) a few bad moments until she finally steers him towards what he really wants – CaroL There is a slap-up kosher wedding to which Alfred and his morose ally, Ernie, bring their own fish and chips, thereby equating their loyalty to Georgie with their disapproval of Georgie’s mother-in-law. The marriage party disperses leaving Mrs. Blitztein taking stock of life’s uneasy balance sheet. An unexploded bomb shatters the cafe. Alfred returns and with the aid of the firemen, the stretcher bearer and the wardens, claws Mrs. Blitztein from the wreckage. Her eyes open weakly on to Alfred’s anxious, irritated face – “You took long enough to get here didn’t you?” she gasps – the crowd relaxes – it’s all right! – “She’s at it again!!” |
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