Like, total drag.

Or, some reflections on the experience of attending Wednesday’s matinée performance of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at the Opera House in Manchester:

It’s fun, sometimes relentlessly so. The film was fun too, but it also had a surprising emotional depth. There’s far less of that in evidence here.

This is very definitely a touring production. While it doesn’t lack spectacle, it’s considerably less elaborate than the Sydney, London and Broadway incarnations of the show, at least judging by the production photographs from those cities.

There’s a bus, but it’s more skeletal than it was, and several larger set-pieces have been cut down, or are simply MIA. The costumes, though, are still incredibly elaborate and often very funny, and the smaller, cheaper set does at least come to us with smaller, cheaper ticket prices attached. And the show plays well enough even with some of the candy-wrapping taken out.

It’s a jukebox musical, meaning there’s no original score. Instead, there’s a nearly nonstop parade of every camp disco classic you’ve ever heard, plus Pat Benatar’s ‘We Belong’ and a couple of ballads. And I never, ever, EVER need to hear Pat Benatar’s ‘We Belong’ again.

This show does, though, do a more intelligent job than usual of making the grab-bag of pop and disco hits fit the plot – even, improbably, in most of the more ‘serious’ scenes. Much of the show’s vocal load is carried by a trio of ‘Divas’ who deliver their numbers in elaborate disco outfits, suspended above the stage. Here, they’re Emma Kingston, Laura Mansell, and Ellie Leah, and they are great, both individually and as a group.

‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, though, is a misstep. It’s a great song, but it’s used in the funeral scene near the top of the show, it’s given inappropriately silly choreography, and it reduces Bernadette’s very real grief to the level of camp clowning. It’s as if the show’s creative team are afraid of slowing down and Being Serious less than ten minutes into Act One, and it’s a choice that seriously short-changes both the actor playing Bernadette and the show as a whole.

All the lines you remember from the film are present and correct, but they’re all played more for laughs than they were in the film, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. That’s not to slight the cast, all of whom do as well as they possibly could with what they’ve been given. Richard Grieve does particularly strong work as Bernadette, despite a stage script (co-written by Stephan Elliott, the film’s screenwriter) that stubbornly refuses to let anyone hold on to a serious emotion for longer than about three seconds before the next glittery production number begins. He can’t quite sell the funeral scene, but I doubt anybody could; elsewhere, he’s funny, touching and believable, and he makes it his own. Given Terence Stamp’s indelible performance in the film, that’s quite an achievement.

As Tick, Jason Donovan redeems himself here for the one other time I’ve seen him onstage – a dreadful 1996 revival of ‘Night Must Fall’ (it’s a dreadful play, it was a dreadful production, and he was dreadful in it). His singing voice, these days, is a little worn around the edges, but that works for the character; he’s really good in the role, and – like Grieve – he manages to land the laughs and supply as much depth of feeling as the stage version allows.

Yes, there are ping-pong balls, accomplished via theatrical sleight-of-hand. It’s a clever conjuring trick, and Frances Mayli McCann’s Cynthia is raucously funny.

The film wasn’t afraid to show moments of realism and grit – compare the stage’s happy-shiny-drag-show opening with the very dark first scene in the film – and it was all the better for it. The stage version, too often, plays like a brightly-coloured fairytale. Given that the heart of the show is three queer/transgendered people trying to find some accommodation with a world that usually does not treat them kindly, that’s a problem. Despite the best efforts of everyone in this cast, the overall effect is sunnier and ultimately less moving than the film, and the stakes don’t seem nearly as high. But hey, there are dancing cupcakes in ‘Macarthur Park’, so who cares about depth?

It’s not that it’s a bad show, the funeral scene aside. There’s plenty of spectacle, even in this cut-down touring production, and the production numbers are energetic and imaginative, and it’s packed with funny lines. It’s big, loud, slick and very entertaining – but it could have been much, much more.

And I’m afraid that once again, the behaviour of some of the audience at the Opera House didn’t add to the show at all. In front of me in act one, there were two ladies who talked constantly and loudly, occasionally breaking off to swig from bottles of wine – not miniatures, either – that they’d brought in from the Tesco across the street. Their charming response to being asked to quieten down? “You can’t tell me what to do, shut your face!”. The house management very kindly found me a different seat for Act Two, so I didn’t have to listen to them during the rest of the show – but that, of course, ducks the problem somewhat, in that they didn’t take any effective steps to protect the other audience members in that section who hadn’t complained. These two ladies were disruptive enough that a competent house management would have thrown them out; it is simply not acceptable to expect an audience who have all paid non-trivial sums of money for their tickets (prices for this show are far lower than they were in the West End, but that doesn’t mean they’re cheap) to put up with the performance being disrupted by people who don’t know how to behave in a theatre. Unfortunately, the Opera House is an Ambassador Theatre Group venue, and ATG are not exactly known for their stellar customer service. The house manager I spoke to was pleasant, apologetic, and very helpful to me, but she was clearly unwilling to take any action that would involve  directly asking these people to tone down their appalling behaviour, and that, I’m afraid, just isn’t good enough.

Oh yes, one more thing: the show, in Manchester, is being presented under ATG’s increasingly fatuous Manchester Gets It First promotional banner. That’s first, in this instance, after Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London, Toronto, New York, Sao Paulo,  Minneapolis, Cleveland, and St. Louis. And all of those venues got a more elaborate physical production than we did. Aren’t we lucky? We’re the first to get the cheap version. Big whoop.

Sex with the light on

“The first few performances are like sex with the light on. They’re fun, but you might see some things you don’t want to.”

I might have paraphrased slightly  – I wasn’t taking notes – but that was Jeff Calhoun, the director and choreographer of the UK tour of the Dolly Parton-scored musical 9 to 5, addressing the audience at the Opera House in Manchester this afternoon during an unscheduled break caused by a scenery malfunction at the show’s second public performance. Apparently they’ve yet to make it all the way through the show without stopping, although this afternoon they got further than they did last night. This afternoon, during the big Act Two production number “Change It”, part of a drop caught on another piece of scenery and threatened to fall down; the stage was cleared, the safety curtain descended, Mr. Calhoun came out to talk to the audience (he was charming, and very funny, and the audience loved him), and the show continued a few minutes later.

It’s live theatre, and it happens. I knew when I bought the ticket that I would be seeing the second public performance of a brand new production, it’s a complicated staging with a lot of moving furniture and drops, and it wasn’t exactly surprising that they had some technical problems. It certainly didn’t spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the show. However… when a show opens in the West End or on Broadway, the first performances (for a big new musical, anything up to the first three or four weeks or performances, in fact) are advertised as previews, which is essentially an admission that you won’t quite be seeing a finished piece of work. When you’re getting a piece of theatre up on its feet – any piece of theatre, but especially a big musical – there is work that cannot be done until there’s an audience present. Previews are when performances get adjusted, the writing is tweaked, and technical problems get resolved. Yes, sure, there are endless tech rehearsals before previews begin, but in a tech rehearsal you can always stop and start a scene again – you don’t have the pressure of having to get through the whole show without a break, which is what you have to aim for as soon as there’s a paying audience watching.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago (meaning within my memory, and I’m not that old), preview performances were sold at a discount. It’s still, I think, the case in the West End and on Broadway that discount codes are more often than not available online for preview performances – at least, if you know where to look. They are, at least, invariably labelled as preview performances in the show’s advertising and on ticketing websites, and instances where they are not have drawn sharp criticism in the press from theatre journalists.

You might have guessed that the Ambassador Theatre Group, which operates the Opera House in Manchester, didn’t bother with any of that. While it is certainly obvious from the tour schedule that the Manchester performances are the production’s first, when I booked the ticket there was no indication anywhere on their booking site that I would be seeing the equivalent of something that, in the West End, would be labelled as a preview, never mind any hint of early performances being sold at any kind of discount. Now, I’ve seen a lot of theatre, I figured it out for myself, and I went ahead and bought the ticket anyway (the Manchester run is not long, later performances here did not work for me, and it’s going to be a good while before the show is playing at any other venue that would be convenient), but it still leaves a faintly nasty taste when something that would, elsewhere, be clearly labelled as work in progress is put on sale at full price as a finished product. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me, given that the Ambassador Theatre Group’s commitment to customer service is not exactly outstanding (really – an almost twenty-minute queue to pick up tickets an hour and a half before the show began  this afternoon, no facility to print tickets at home, a somewhat lackadaisical attitude towards dealing with customer complaints), but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the standards that apply in the West End to apply here too, particularly given that a top-price ticket to this afternoon’s performance, with fees, would have cost over £40 (cheaper than the West End, true, but still not cheap). If it’s a preview, call it a preview. Let the audience know what they’re buying. If the show’s only in town for a week and a half, they’ll come anyway.

All that having been said, when they’ve worked out the kinks – there were a couple of other noticeable flubs, a very obvious misplaced prop which the actors covered beautifully (the phone cord that Doralee is supposed to use to tie Hart up was not where it should have been, and Amy Lennox had to go offstage to get it), and reflections in odd places near the top of the set that suggest there’s still work to be done on Ken Billington’s otherwise fine lighting – it’s going to be terrific. It’s already a very, very entertaining show, albeit one with a few significant flaws that, at this point in the show’s slightly chequered history, are not going to go away. Dolly Parton, of course, starred in the movie (along with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin); for the musical, she’s supplied a score that’s often great fun. No, this is not one of the great contemporary musical theatre scores, but this is an appealing and effective collection of songs, and the good stuff – particularly an extended opening sequence woven out of the movie’s theme song – is really good. True, nearly all of the music sounds like it comes from a Dolly Parton album – she doesn’t really manage to subsume her own distinctive musical voice and write in character – and some of the lyrics clunk, but unlike other recent musicals-adapted-from-films that have passed this way, this score never sounds like musical wallpaper (I’m looking at YOU, Ghost and Sister Act and Legally Blonde). The show flopped in its initial Broadway outing, and the version that’s being performed here reflects the US touring production, which was somewhat revised; the order of songs in Act One has been slightly tweaked, the three separate revenge fantasies have been conflated into a single extended musical sequence (called, of course, ‘Sexist, Egotistical, Lying, Hypocritical Bigot’, which is possibly the film’s most famous line), and two songs – ‘I Just Might’ and  ‘Always a Woman’ – have been cut. The book – like the source film’s screenplay, by Patricia Resnick – is fast and funny, albeit more cartoonish now than the film was; if the denoument currently seems a little breathless, it’ll probably settle down a bit once the actors have a few more performances under their belt.

And the actors, it has to be said, are this production’s biggest asset. In Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Parton and Dabney Coleman, the film fielded a formidable quartet of leads (in the right role, Parton can be a terrific screen actress); the biggest compliment I can pay their counterparts here is that they made me forget their predecessors. Ben Richards is a strong-voiced, hilariously sleazy Hart, Amy Lennox is an adorable Doralee (and has the hardest job, in that she’s playing the Dolly Parton role, and Parton herself – in the form of projected film – narrates the show’s opening and closing sequences and actually comes right out and says that Doralee is her role), Natalie Casey is pretty much perfect as downtrodden Judy, and Jackie Clune’s sassy, sardonic Violet just about walks away with the show. All four have strong singing voices, great presence, and laser-sharp comic timing; none of them are quite ‘stars’ (in the above-the-title, their-name-sells-tickets sense), but all of them should be.

And then there’s Bonnie Langford as office supervisor Roz. It’s a second-banana role with a few scenes, a mediocre song in Act One, and a reprise of the title-song in Act Two, but she cleans up. She takes ‘Heart to Hart’ – a frumpy-secretary-has-the-hots-for-the-boss number that’s just about the least interesting thing in the score, and effortlessly turns it into the production’s biggest showstopper. It helps that she’s given terrific, funny choreography (by Calhoun and Lisa Stevens), but the energy, killer belt and ingenious comic timing are all her own. She’s great, and somebody needs to write her a big old-fashioned musical comedy to star in, stat.

The rest? The ensemble have tons of energy, the bit-parts are all impeccably filled, Kenneth Foy’s witty set (drops, office furniture on castors, Hart’s bedroom) moves fluidly and affectionately mocks ugly late-70s ‘good taste’ (the bright costumes are great too, but – oddly – nobody owns up to them in the programme), the eight-piece band are impeccably tight (the sound design, though, is often muddy, and in the ensemble numbers the bass is turned up way too high – that, again, is something that tends to get worked out in previews), and Calhoun’s slick staging never lets the pace flag. It’s good now, and it’ll be better a few weeks from now. Everyone onstage is clearly having a wonderful time, and that sense of fun spills across the footlights; the writing isn’t always magical, and this performance was rougher around the edges than you’d expect from something that was not sold as a preview, but the cast’s enthusiasm is absolutely infectious, and for once the (more or less obligatory at a big musical at the Opera House) standing ovation did not feel forced.

So yes, it’s well worth going – but if you see it over the next week in Manchester, be aware that they’re still working. It’s great fun, but – as of right now – it isn’t quite finished.

Legally Bland

She’s ba-aaack!

All over Manchester, this week, you’ll see the faces of Gareth Gates and Jennifer Ellison peering down from posters advertising the return engagement of Legally Blonde at the Opera House. Since this is, of course, the stage version of the Reece Witherspoon sorority-babe-goes-t0-law-school movie, you might reasonably assume that Ms. Ellison – a bubbly blonde musical theatre actress whose wider fame is based on the five years she spent in the Liverpudlian TV soap Brookside -  is playing the central role of Elle Woods, the titular blonde who enrols in Harvard Law School in order to win back her man, but ends up finding herself instead.

Nope.

You might also reasonably assume that Mr. Gates – a reality TV contestant turned pop star turned musical theatre actor – is playing the largest male role, teaching assistant Emmett Forrest (the Luke Wilson role in the film).

Again, nope.

You might further assume, on entering the theatre, purchasing a programme, and reading these two actors’ magnificently pompous (not to mention l o n g) programme bios, that you are in the presence of stars the like of which you have never seen before, gifted individuals who can hold the audience in the palms of their hands, heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, and make the lame walk again. Mr. Gates, apparently, “was awarded Best International Male in 2003/4 from MTV Asia, MTV China and MTV Taiwan”, while Ms. Ellison, after appearing in Dancing on Ice, “proved so popular that she went on to skate her way around the country on the national tour.”

Gosh. And nope.

The real leads – Faye Brookes as Elle Woods (she’s local, born in Flixton) and Iwan Lewis as Emmett – are both young, only a few years out of drama school, and very, very winning indeed. Ms. Brookes has a strong pop voice, an easy charm, and sharp comic timing; if she doesn’t quite have the effortless star quality that the wonderful Sheridan Smith brought to the role in London (yes, this is not my first time seeing the show), she also, thank God, doesn’t emulate the unpleasantly robotic performance given by Laura Bell Bundy in the telecast of the Broadway production. Mr. Lewis is even better – he’s got charm, presence, timing, a great voice, and he can act. But, oops, neither of them have yet done a soap or a reality TV show, so they don’t get their faces on the posters. That’s showbiz, folks.

The show itself is… well, the kindest description is ‘passably OK’. It’s a solid, professional effort, and it plays well enough, even in this slimmed-down touring version. The musical and lyrics (by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin – both did both) are attractive and entertaining, but never much more than that, and Heather Hach’s book, give or take a few minor alterations, is a by-the-numbers retread of the source film’s screenplay. There’s effective but never quite show-stopping choreography by Jerry Mitchell, bright costumes by Gregg Barnes, appropriately gaudy lighting by Kenneth Posner and Paul Miller, and the remnants of what was, in London and on Broadway, a terrific cartoonish set by David Rockwell. Broadway and London got 3D buildings and an actual staircase; the provinces get slightly cheaper tickets, a much smaller band, and painted flats instead of moving set pieces. It does say something for the show itself that it still works in a less elaborate production.

It’s not that I expect greatness every time I go to the theatre, but this is not a great musical, or even a particularly good one. It’s fun, but that’s not the same thing. It’s never bad, it’s always entertaining, but there is never, even for one second, any sense of what prompted the original producers and creative team to try and turn the source film into a musical. There’s a kind of effortless magic to a really good musical comedy, and it’s absent here (although Sheridan Smith, in the London production, managed to go a long way towards providing the spark that’s been missing from other incarnations of the show – really, whatever they paid her, it wasn’t enough). It’s a good-enough, entertaining-enough diversion with a wholesome message about self-empowerment, but that’s all.

So do this touring production’s two above-the-title supporting players supply the missing element of magic? It’d be lovely if they did, but no, they don’t. Ms. Ellison plays Paulette, the beauty-salon proprietor who becomes Elle’s friend and confidante (and, oh yes, falls for a hunky UPS delivery guy), and she’s perfectly OK. She sings well, dances well, gets laughs in all the right places, but this isn’t a star cameo, it’s a decent-enough supporting performance. She is, though, better than Mr. Gates, who plays Warner, the slimy ex Elle follows to law school. Admittedly, in the musical, it’s a bit of a nothing role, but Mr. Gates brings nearly nothing to it. He hits his notes and his marks, and preens on cue, but he’s neither charismatic nor funny (odd, since he managed to be both in Loserville at the West Yorkshire Playhouse earlier this year).

If all of this sounds like I had a terrible time, I didn’t. I’d seen it before, I knew what I was paying for, I had a discount code, and I was entertained, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with going to the theatre looking for empty calories every once in a while. Given the relative thinness of the writing, a bit more glitz (in the form of the bulkier set pieces that are missing from this incarnation of the show) might have been nice, but the show worked well enough without them. As I said, it’s a solid, professional, entertaining piece of work – it’s just that whenever I watch this show, or listen to the cast recording, I can’t shake the feeling that it should be better than it is.

Monkee poop

Twenty-three songs, twenty-five scenes, twenty actors, seven musicians, two acts, spies (Russian, American and British), three singing nuns… and maybe half a joke. Yes, folks, I sat through Monkee Business: The Musical, a jukebox musical based on the music of The Monkees which is now lumbering through the third week of a tryout run at the Manchester Opera House. In time, I hope, the memories will fade, the scars will begin to heal, and I’ll stop having nightmares. The show is being presented in Manchester under an initiative called Manchester Gets it First, which was created by the Ambassador Theatre Group in an attempt to position Manchester as the UK’s preeminent tryout city for large commercial theatrical productions.  Presumably something violently unpleasant happened to one of ATG’s executives somewhere in Manchester; on the evidence of this show and the dismal Ghost, which premiered here last year, the setting up of this programme in Manchester can only be construed as an act of bitter revenge.

It’s not, actually, that I think a jukebox musical based (mostly) on the back catalogue of The Monkees is an inherently stupid idea – it’s just that this jukebox musical based (mostly) on the back catalogue of The Monkees is built around an inherently stupid idea. We’re in 1968, at the height of The Monkees’ fame; a concert promoter hires four lookalikes to tour Russia, Japan, Italy, Spain, France and England as The Monkees because the band themselves are too busy to make the trip, and wacky hijinks ensue, involving spies, singing nuns (yes, they sing Dominique) and… oh, who cares? It’s not as if any of it makes sense while you’re watching it either.

It wouldn’t matter at all that the plot doesn’t make sense, of course, if any of it actually made you laugh. At all. The Monkees’ original TV series was entirely built around this kind of outlandishly farcical plot-line, and it was consistently fresh and funny. Monkee Business: The Musical is neither. It’s staler than a two-month-old Danish, and about as funny as a migraine. The show’s book was perpetrated by Peter Benedict, who should know better; I refuse to say he ‘wrote’ it because the mess of a musical that’s currently stillborn on the Opera House’s stage strongly suggests that, rather than write the show, Mr. Benedict simply spat it into a napkin after eating bad shellfish. It’s not just that the jokes don’t land – there are no jokes. There are running un-gags about how improbable future inventions like Starbucks, mobile phones and Twitter seem from the perspective of 1968, and even less funny un-gags in which characters onstage periodically break the fourth wall to comment on the artificiality of theatrical performance (“…and by the miracle of theatrical design, we’re there already!”), contained in scenes which seem to start and stop rather than begin and end and which don’t ever add up to anything you could call a coherent plot, punctuated by miscued songs. Structurally, the show isn’t just a mess. It’s an apocalypse with concert lighting, cheap sets, and a band.

You can’t really blame the actors, who do their best with the horrendous material. The four actors playing the fake Monkees – Ben Evans (Davy Jones), Stephen Kirwan (Mickey Dolenz), Tom Parsons (Mike Nesmith, giving the best performance in the show) and Oliver Savile (Peter Tork) – do their best to sell the awful script, and sometimes nearly succeed, and in their musical numbers, they’re legitimately terrific. When they’re singing, they do manage to capture the original band’s infectious sense of fun, and it’s mostly their performances of the songs that kept me from running screaming from the theatre in search of brain bleach when the interval rolled around.

The supporting cast don’t fare as well, mostly because they don’t get to sing as much. Tony Timberlake struggles manfully with a series of not-very-funny comic cameo roles, and has fun duetting with Kirwan’s Mickey Dolenz on ‘Randy Scouse Git’ in the first act. Michelle Bishop, lumbered with playing a Russian spy named Nikita Smirnoff (I know, and that’s about as funny as the show gets), does a good job of slinking around in leather and singing the Beatles’ ‘Back in the USSR’ (why?), and it isn’t her fault that there are more laughs in the last ten minutes of Medea than she manages to raise in this. She clearly has excellent comic timing, but she’s given nothing to use it on. Scarlette Douglas plays a traffic warden, and sings ‘My Boy Lollipop’. I hope she knows why, because I don’t. Cassandra Compton, similarly, does a really good job with her big number, ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ (the Monkees were not big on solo songs for women), but despite her best efforts she can’t manage to sell a role that stubbornly refuses to make any kind of sense.  And that’s true, more or less, of the rest of the cast. When they sing, even given that the musical staging is usually uninspiring, the show starts to come to life – but then the song ends, and it dies again, and the cast can’t resuscitate it because there was no life in the script to begin with. Even the usually-reliable Linal Haft is defeated by the role of the promoter. I know he can be funny, I’ve seen him do it before, but all he’s given here is a series of shyster stereotypes and the weakest catchphrase ever written (“You wouldn’t like it!”), and it isn’t enough.

(Fact about Mr. Haft – his wife, also an actor, has the best name in showbiz, bar none: Buster Skeggs. She’s really good, too – once upon a time, she was a hysterically funny Amy in Company at the Oldham Coliseum, and she was also an excellent Carlotta in Follies at the Leicester Haymarket.)

None of the actors are helped by the show’s director, David Taylor, whose work is… rudimentary, meaning that it almost rises to the level of Peter Benedict’s book. This kind of show needs pace and energy, and he gives it neither; it just sort of sits there, which means that there’s no comic momentum whatsoever, which leaves you, unfortunately, with ample time to contemplate the many, many shortcomings in the writing (and the person seated about ten rows in front of me who was texting all the way through Act Two). Again, I know he’s done good work before, even in comedy, because I’ve seen it; presumably, for some reason, he chose not to here. Morgan Large’s costumes – straight out of Austin Powers, a far funnier take on the same milieu – are sometimes witty, and his set, which consists mostly of cutout buildings that look like something from a pop-art pop-up book, demonstrates that at least someone involved in the show had something resembling an idea. What he didn’t get is much of a budget; the set looks cheap, although the costumes don’t. The lighting (by James Whiteside) is appropriately lurid. The band, led by Richard Beadle, are excellent, and so is Clem Rawlins’ sound design – it’s a rock musical, so it’s loud, but you can actually hear all of the lyrics, even in the ensemble numbers, and that doesn’t happen as often as you’d think.

And the Monkees’ songs, in fact, do stand up to the jukebox musical treatment, even when they’re surrounded by a show that’s mostly really, really terrible. There are strong, surprisingly durable, thoroughly entertaining pop classics that still sound fresh and fun forty-odd years after they were first released. It’s easy to see the attraction in building a jukebox musical around them, and it’s a great shame that this production’s creative personnel have so thoroughly botched the show they’ve created (I mean, really – at times, I found myself longing for the wit and subtlety of Ben Elton’s book for We Will Rock You, which is possibly the most appallingly crass long-running hit musical London has ever seen). This is the first tryout run, of course, so there’s theoretically time for work to be done, but the odds of this succeeding are not good: the theatre was less than a quarter full, and the show’s third booking (in Sunderland) has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales (the Glasgow performances next week are going ahead, although a glance at the King’s Theatre website suggests that ticket sales there are also pretty dire). Clearly it needs a major overhaul if it’s ever going to reach the West End (or the end of next week); firing Mr. Taylor and Mr. Benedict would be a good place to start, because what this show smacks of, more than anything else, is cynical people who should know better turning in fifth-rate work on a show they intend to palm off on a provincial audience that they condescendingly assume will buy whatever dreck they choose to sell as long as it comes packaged with familiar songs, attractive performers and a flashy light show. The actors and band deserve better, and should run Mr. Taylor and Mr. Benedict out of the theatre, possibly with pitchforks and burning torches, for stranding them in this mess.

But hey, at least Manchester Gets It First. Glasgow, you have been warned.

That Day We Sang

A middle-aged, nondescript man listens to a recording that was made by a choir he was in as a child, forty years ago. He hasn’t heard it in over thirty years, and all of a sudden he finds he’s crying. He can’t articulate why.

The recording is real, the character is fictional. It’s less than five minutes into the first act of Victoria Wood’s new musical play That Day We Sang, which is currently being performed at the Opera House in Manchester as part of the Manchester International Festival, and it’s both the play’s key scene and a neat encapsulation of the effect this utterly beguiling piece of theatre is going to have. As a piece of writing, That Day We Sang is a little on the slight side, and more than a little obvious – but it’s also surprisingly moving.

Based around a notional 1969 reunion of people who, as children, participated in the 1929 Manchester Schools recording of Henry Purcell’s Nymphs and Shepherds, That Day We Sang moves backwards and forwards between 1929 and 1969, juxtaposing the choir’s rehearsals for the performance and recording with the tentative, sweetly sad friendship (and on his part, would-be romance) between Tubby and Enid, two lonely people who, as adults, have a nagging feeling that nothing they’ve done since has quite matched the excitement of that glorious performance in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall.

Yes, it’s an obvious story, and no, there is precisely no suspense as the play moves towards its conclusion – we know the recording will be a triumph because we’ve all heard it, and we assume that Tubby will eventually win Enid’s heart because that’s how things work in romantic comedy and this play plays by the rules, right down to the character of the gruff, strict schoolteacher who turns out, at a key moment, to have a heart of gold. You can see the plot coming a mile off, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

The thing is, this sort of thing is Wood’s stock-in-trade. Like Alan Bennett or Jack Rosenthal or Willy Russell, she has a knack for finding the yearning as well as the humour in the lives of ordinary people, and she has the odd gift of being able to write scenes that are simultaneously raucously funny and achingly sad. She’s from Greater Manchester herself, she knows (and loves) the territory, her songwriting talents extend far, far beyond the two-minute comedy ditties with which she made her name on television in the 1970s, and she never condescends; what she’s written, essentially, is a love-letter to music in schools, tied to a sweetly charming love story. In lesser hands, this could easily have been a procession of syrupy clichés, but it’s not. It’s a quirky but quietly lovely musical comedy about everyday people living everyday lives. And you can’t help but love a show that contains an extended production number set at a ghastly dinner in a Berni Inn, whose lyrics describe Black Forest gateau as “cake in drag”.

It helps that the choir – drawn from four Manchester primary schools – is wonderful. The children sing beautifully (and, in a couple of important rehearsal scenes, also manage to pull off singing badly with conviction, which isn’t that easy to do when you’re capable of singing well), are absolutely natural and charming onstage, and are a credit to their teachers and to Anna Flannagan, the production’s choir master. The Hallé Youth Orchestra do a superb job as the pit band, and it’s sadly a treat, these days, to go to a musical and hear thirty-one musicians all playing real instruments, with not a single synth string pad in earshot. The adult actors, too, are absolutely terrific, led by Vincent Franklin and Jenna Russell’s pitch-perfect performances as Tubby and Enid. Russell is particularly funny in an act two number in which Enid rails, in the form of a tango, against the lowered expectations that come with a name as nondescript of hers (“You won’t have a box of sex tricks/You won’t hum like a Scalextric” – musical theatre pedants take note, this is not a false rhyme, kids around here commonly pronounce “scalextric” as ending with an X sound rather than a hard C), but it’s the heartbroken look on her face as she tells a glib TV interviewer that the experience of making the record in 1929 was “joyful… just joyful” that you’ll carry away with you after the show. And the finale, in which Wood cleverly works a duet for Tubby and Enid in counterpoint against the choir’s performance of “Nymphs and Shepherds”, is simply gorgeous.

Whether it’ll have a life after the Manchester International Festival is another question, although it deserves to. It’s not quite perfect – there are places where the pace could pick up a little, Young Tubby’s first song needs to happen earlier in the opening scene (and unfortunately is the weakest song in the show), and the first duet between Enid and Tubby is not the greatest thing Wood has ever written. But these are quibbles; this show works. It reminded me, oddly, of She Loves Me, although it’s quite different in structure and tone: both shows pack an emotional wallop that’s far greater than the sum of their parts.

And where else will you find a musical with scenes set in a Golden Egg, a Wimpy, and on a bench in Piccadilly Gardens?