Mad About Productions
Grand Theatre, Lancaster
20 May 2006

I love musicals, which is why it’s so great living just up the road from the Lancaster Grand. But the trouble with going to a whole performance of songs from different musicals is that you already have your own favourite musicals, and your own favourite songs from them, in mind. Will the performers include them? More importantly, will they perform them in the way you think (indeed, are convinced) they should be performed?

When you arrive at the Grand, you eagerly check your (glossy and impersonal) Mad About the Musicals programme, but are not much the wiser: you find a list of musicals from some of which the songs for tonight’s performance will come. So you have to wait and see. Which, given that your fixed ideas almost always lead to disappointment, may be a very good thing.

OK, it’s a matter of taste. But, for me, on the whole, Michael Courtney (also the Director), Eddie Dredge, Katie Carr, Victoria Betterton and Ashley Oliver did not disappoint as regards the content of the two-hour show. Several of my own personal favourites were there: ‘I don’t know how to love him’ from Jesus Christ Superstar, ‘Somewhere that’s green’ from Little Shop of Horrors, ‘All that jazz’ from Chicago and ‘Bohemian rhapsody’ from We Will Rock You. All right - ‘Tomorrow’ from Annie as well.

The show is well-structured – it’s not just one song after another. It starts with a medley and a ‘test’ for the audience on the names of the songs and the musicals to which they belong. Later in the first half, several songs from Les Miserables and from Jesus Christ Superstar are included, consecutively, which provides more coherence and context than the rendition of one after another from different musicals would. And it’s all technically very smooth and slick – the dramatic lighting, the frequent costume changes. But the performance of so many of the songs lacks feeling – perhaps a combination of the performers’ over-familiarity with their numbers, the fact that they are singing them out of their intended dramatic context, and the overall glitziness.

Energy can be a good substitute for feeling – and ‘All that jazz’ comes across brilliantly here – but Victoria Betterton’s version of Nancy’s conceptually problematic but poignant ‘As long as he needs me’ (Oliver!) did not come across as poignant at all. Perhaps shows like these are better suited to pathos rather than poignancy; certainly Ashley Oliver’s ‘Somewhere that’s green’ and the ‘The girl in 14G’ (apparently cut from Thoroughly Modern Millie at the last minute) were more able to command a degree of audience empathy. The real success for this audience may however have been Michael Courtney and Eddie Dredge’s ‘Flip flop fly’ (Blues Brothers), complete with pantomime-style song-lyrics (see also website below) at the back of the stage and audience participation (at least in terms of hand-jiving). If there is a child in everyone, Courtney and Dredge got right to him or her in those few moments.

A final reservation. The show is fronted (sometimes amusingly, sometimes patronisingly) by Michael Courtney and to a lesser extent by Eddie Dredge. The three women sing and dance and aim to look good, in very traditional and predictable female ways, but do not talk directly to the audience – the show does not do too much in terms of progressive gender relations in the real world.

Jane Sunderland
21/5/06

LINKS

Musicals mentioned above and currently playing in the UK:

Chicago

Les Miserables

We Will Rock You

‘Flip flop fly’ lyrics