What do you do on the sunniest May bank holiday weekend in years? If you’re me, you go to the theatre. Granted, I booked the ticket months before I saw the weather forecast, and I don’t much like sitting in the sun – but as it turns out, the West Yorkshire Playhouse‘s revival of Sunshine on Leith, the jukebox musical based on the songs of the Proclaimers, is even more uplifting than a concentrated dose of sunshine, and you won’t get sunburned.
If you’ve seen the film – and if you haven’t, you should – you’ll know what you’re getting: a slightly soap-opera-ish romantic-comedy-slash-family-drama centred on two soldiers returning home to Leith from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, and carefully woven around a stack of Proclaimers songs. The film is a gorgeous, glorious joy from beginning to end; in James Brining’s new production, the stage version is a little grittier, a little more carefully working-class, and it doesn’t have the film’s pull-out-all-the-stops flash-mob finale outside the Scottish National Gallery, but it’s utterly charming, and Stephen Greenhorn‘s book tells a sweetly touching story of ordinary people muddling through their ordinary lives.
There are lovely performances, too, from everyone in the ensemble cast (some of whom also play instruments – guitar, sax, trumpet – to supplement the production’s fine seven-piece band). You don’t get the film’s string section, but David Shrubsole’s folk-pop arrangements suit the stage production’s more down-to-earth tone very well, and remind us, as the film did, that this is a superb set of songs. They’re beautifully sung here, too – yes, by everyone, although Hilary Maclean’s movingly restrained take on the title song might be first among equals. Brining’s production keeps the pace moving but never feels rushed, Colin Richmond’s cleverly simple set takes us from a patrol in Helmand to a pub on Leith Walk to a Leith tenement via a hospital, a supermarket, and even Waverley Station, and the finale – yes, ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)‘, and get ready to sing along – is a jolt of pure theatrical ecstasy. The cast and band are clearly having the most wonderful time doing this show, the audience – me too – had a wonderful time watching it, the standing ovation at the curtain call was absolutely spontaneous and very well-deserved, and the Proclaimers, via video screen, got the final bow.
That’s as it should be; Greenhorn’s book is a tremendously skilful piece of writing (he’s given it a light update this time around; at one point, a Brexit reference gets a huge laugh), but there’s a clear-eyed, unsentimental realness to these songs, and they’re the element that gives the show its emotional depth. This is that rarest of things: a genuinely moving jukebox musical that elevates rather than diminishes the songbook it draws from, and that charms the audience instead of trying to beat them into submission (well, more or less – I got a balloon in my face in the finale, but I’ll live). I didn’t have to walk 500 miles to see it, but it would have been worth it.
Saving the word, one apostrophe at a time. 