Edinburgh Playhouse
2 stars
Amy Winehouse, Candy Payne and now Welsh warbler Duffy have brilliantly reinvented the 1960s Brit-girl sound for the Jools Holland generation. Let’s hope they never end up tarnishing the originals legacy as this wannabe juke-box musical does. First produced in America and re-drawn with a book full of antique gags by sketch-writer Julie Balloo, Shout! takes three girls on a jaunty skip through the decade that changed the world. Arriving off the London train, home-girl Betty, would-be movie star Georgina and Claire Sweeney’s good-time Liver-bird Ruby shack up in the flat above Su Pollards’s Peckham hairdressing salon just as things are about to swing. Serenaded in by Tony Hatch’s Downtown four years before it was written, it’s a mod, mod world, as proved by a groovy young magazine editor who acts as narrator while sporting a selection of pastel-coloured polo-necks.
All harmless enough if it hadn’t been put together so sloppily. The musical arrangements on chicken-in-a-basket classics by Hatch, Bacharach and co sound more 80s than 60s, while Sweeney, alas, is no Lulu, Cilla or Dusty. She probably wouldn’t even be allowed in The Vernons Girls. Which in a way makes her perfect for Shout! Most people’s live musical experience of the 60s, after all, was more about nasally challenged pub singers than London Palladium glitz. Which conversely means this is a lot more honest about its era. Here, 1968 isn’t about manning the barricades in Paris, but has the girls copping off as nauseum on a cheap package tour to Toremolinos.
Despite Pollard’s chutzpah and a couple of numbers by the supporting cast that hit the mark, this is cabaret writ large. Nothing wrong with that, as there’s a great Tony Hatch jukebox musical to be had. Sadly, this isn’t it.
The Herald, March 6th 2008
ends
2 stars
Amy Winehouse, Candy Payne and now Welsh warbler Duffy have brilliantly reinvented the 1960s Brit-girl sound for the Jools Holland generation. Let’s hope they never end up tarnishing the originals legacy as this wannabe juke-box musical does. First produced in America and re-drawn with a book full of antique gags by sketch-writer Julie Balloo, Shout! takes three girls on a jaunty skip through the decade that changed the world. Arriving off the London train, home-girl Betty, would-be movie star Georgina and Claire Sweeney’s good-time Liver-bird Ruby shack up in the flat above Su Pollards’s Peckham hairdressing salon just as things are about to swing. Serenaded in by Tony Hatch’s Downtown four years before it was written, it’s a mod, mod world, as proved by a groovy young magazine editor who acts as narrator while sporting a selection of pastel-coloured polo-necks.
All harmless enough if it hadn’t been put together so sloppily. The musical arrangements on chicken-in-a-basket classics by Hatch, Bacharach and co sound more 80s than 60s, while Sweeney, alas, is no Lulu, Cilla or Dusty. She probably wouldn’t even be allowed in The Vernons Girls. Which in a way makes her perfect for Shout! Most people’s live musical experience of the 60s, after all, was more about nasally challenged pub singers than London Palladium glitz. Which conversely means this is a lot more honest about its era. Here, 1968 isn’t about manning the barricades in Paris, but has the girls copping off as nauseum on a cheap package tour to Toremolinos.
Despite Pollard’s chutzpah and a couple of numbers by the supporting cast that hit the mark, this is cabaret writ large. Nothing wrong with that, as there’s a great Tony Hatch jukebox musical to be had. Sadly, this isn’t it.
The Herald, March 6th 2008
ends
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