Sam Bailey’s April Devonshire, left, and Nina Wadia’s Gemma Warner, with the Birmingham skyline behind them, reconnect in NOW That’s What I Call A Musical. Picture: Pamela Raith
THE familiar chunky bold typeface and loud colours of the NOW compilation album series greets the audience on a huge sign, hanging high above Tom Rogers and Toots Butcher’s set design, to announce we are in the presence of NOW That’s What I Call A Musical.
Next, the equally familiar tones of Craig Revel Horwood, the pantomime villain of Strictly Come Dancing’s judges, voices the obligatory recorded request to switch off all electronic equipment, backed up by the promise of a fab-u-lous show.
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he, as he is the director-choreography, and the show has all the hallmarks of what the flamboyant Australian loves in a performance: energy, more energy, impish expression, personality and well-drilled routines.
NOW That’s What I Call A Musical is very much Now That’s What I Call A Jukebox Musical, driven in this case by a multitude of 1980s’ smashes guilty pleasures and karaoke bangers with musical supervision, orchestrations and vocal arrangements by Mark Crossland that are invariably as loud and bold as that NOW signage.
NOW’s book writer, Pippa Evans, is an author, writer, performer and BBC Radio 4 and Edinburgh Fringe musical comedy regular with a track record for improvisation and musical theatre (as a founder member of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical), and significantly too she was the dramaturg on 9 To 5: The Musical.
In other words, she knows how to structure a musical’s emotional ebb and flow, and now, in adding ‘jukebox musical’ to her polymath portfolio, she shows a facility for finding humorous ways to shoehorn songs with a knowing wink into the flow of her plot, from Tainted Love to Gold, Everybody Wants To Rule The World to St Elmo’s Fire, as well as delivering punchlines and putdowns aplenty.
That plot is set in Birmingham, now and back then, or more accurately in 2009 and 1989, opening at the Sparkhill school reunion for the Class of ’89, leading into a full-throttle burst of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax, one of multiple ensemble numbers that revel in Revel Horwood’s terpsichorean panache.
At this “most dreaded event of their lives”, stoical nurse Gemma Warner (Nina Wadia, last seen in York as Fairy Sugarsnap in the Theatre Royal’s 2023-2024 pantomime Jack And The Beanstalk) is awaiting the arrival of April Devonshire (The X Factor winner Sam Bailey), the best friend she has not seen for years since she headed for Hollywood.
The open-plan design allows the storyline to move between the 20-year division, quickly introducing the younger versions of the more practical Gemma (Nikita Johal) and the dreamer April (Maia Hawkins) that go on to dominate Act One, with scenes in the Warner kitchen and the schoolgirls’ bedrooms in days of planning their lives around Number One magazine quizzes and dreaming of snogging Rick Astley.
We see how Mum (Poppy Tierney) and Dad (Christopher Glover) met (cue their version of Tainted Love, Brummie accents et al), as well as younger versions of Gemma’s entrepreneurial brother Frank (Luke Latchman), school lad Steve (Matthew Mori) and later mullet-haired Tim (Kieran Cooper), who will give hints of the cheating husband to Gemma that he becomes (Chris Grahamson).
Some songs, such as Grahamson’s venal performance of Gold, are used to capture a character; others, like a dazzling silver-suited take on Video Called The Radio Star are there for the fun of it. Some, notably Tainted Love, combine both, switching from a confessional duet for Mum and Dad into an elegant dance routine for six ensemble members.
Act Two fills in the blanks of the missing years, taking on the darker themes of infidelity, broken promises, shattered dreams, strained friendships and infertility as the older Gemma and April move centre stage, with Wadia and Bailey taping into pathos and pain as much as humour (especially in Wadia’s drunken scene) as the revelations mount and the friction sparks.
Wadia, in her first pop musical role, has worked on her singing skills to be more than proficient alongside the powerhouse Bailey, whose opening to Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves is the show’s knockout vocal high point.
Grahamson’s smug rat Tim comes to the fore, Shakil Hussain’s Frank steps out of the shadows, and both Callum Tempest’s Barney and Phil Sealey’s Steve have their moment, the latter putting a full vat of chips into his fleshy take on the Chippendales. Meanwhile, Lauren Hendricks’s teacher Ms Dorian makes the most of her cameos too.
The show taps further into the Eighties’ nostalgia with a roster of guest stars for the tour, from Sonia and T’Pau’s Carol Decker to Toyah Willcox (in Edinburgh) and Sinitta, York’s star turn, who turns from bedroom wall poster and face on a bedspread to bursting into life at Gemma’s initiation and duly sings So Macho, all in white, with a diva final flourish.
She returns for the medley finale too, an effervescent conclusion to a show that may be clichéd but has heart and much as hits and humour, knows its target audience, knows Birmingham (with a good joke about its “beauty”), and knows its Eighties’ pop nuggets, from the teenage exuberance of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and a creepy Every Breath You Take to a table-spinning You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) and a climactic Hold Me Now.
NOW That’s What I Call A Musical runs at Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.