Carrie Hope Fletcher’s Calamity in Nikolai Foster’s production of Calamity Jane. Picture: Mark Senior
MUM knows best. West End leading lady Carrie Hope Fletcher has played Éponine and Fantine in Les Misérables, Veronica Sawyer in Heathers: The Musical and Wednesday in The Addams Family, as well as originating the role of Cinderella in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, but her mother reckoned there was one role her South Harrow daughter was born to play.
Namely, the gun-slingin’, tough-talkin’, hard-ridin’ American frontierswoman Calamity Jane, the feisty tomboy role immortalised by Doris Day in the 1953 film and last played on tour on the Grand Opera House stage by Jodie Prenger in February 2015.
Mrs Fletcher’s instinct was spot on. Here was a Calamity waiting to happen, you could say. Carrying her mum’s hopes, Carrie Hope is whip-smart in The Watermill’s cracker of a touring production as York audiences experience her musical theatre chops for the first time, having seen her only in Love Letters, her exploration in song of all forms of love, from romantic to maternal, unrequited to obsessive, at York Barbican last October.
What a fabulous voice she has, even if the emotional release of the serenading Secret Love was shared with a women in the row behind your reviewer, who could not resist joining in with every line. Please, please desist.
Perhaps now is the time to introduce a singalong performance for every familiar touring musical to abate this selfish trend. If not, dear audiences, show better instinct when to join in, pretty much at the cast’s invitation here for reprises of Deadwood Stage and Black Hills Of Dakota.
Seren Sandham-Davies’s Katie Brown, the wannabe showgirl in Calamity Jane. Picture: Mark Senior
The 2025 Calamity Jane carries all the hallmarks of the 2015 version: direction by North Yorkshireman Nikolai Foster; co-direction and choreography by Nick Winston; set and costume design by Matthew Wright; musical supervision and orchestration by Catherine Jayes, topped off by the witty touch of the plush Grand Opera House being covered by a worn, faded, ropey one to transform the York theatre into the financially stricken Golden Garter theatre in Deadwood, South Dakota.
A lonesome banjo is attached, the first sign that this will be an actor-musician musical, where even Carrie Hope Fletcher joins on coconuts to mimic the sound and motion of a horse and carriage.
Complementing Wright’s nostalgic palette of colours in his evocation of the Deadwood City of Summer 1876, Tim Mitchell’s lighting compounds the sense of being amid the summer dust, dry heat, bluest skies and wild life of the Midwest, where Calamity Jane’s entrance is held back to enable maximum impact after talk aplenty about of how she “tried to behave like a man but couldn’t help lovin’ like a woman”.
Fletcher looks right at home in buckskins and britches, hands on her gun belt, quips on her lips, Dakota accent on a roll. Her Calamity whips up a storm; she sure can crack a wisecrack and she is as abrasive as coal tar soap once was, but behind the brassy front of this game gal is a vulnerability that steadily seeps through, especially when her romantic feelings are exposed.
Fletcher’s Calamity does not need to fire a gun to make an impact on each return, and crucially for the light, humorous tone of Foster’s production of Sammy Fain, Paul Francis Webster and Charles K Freeman’s musical, Fletcher’s performance is suffused with fun to go with the games being played.
Falling out: Vinny Coyle’s Wild Bill Hickok clashes with Carrie Hope Fletcher’s Calamity. Picture: Mark Senior
Caught up in those games are Vinny Coyle’s Wild Bill Hickok and Luke Wilson’s Lieutenant Danny Gilmartin, as they squabble over Seren Sandham-Davies’s young maid and wannabe singer Katie Brown.
As in 2015, Jayes’s orchestrations bring out the golden ripeness of such familiar songs as The Deadwood Stage, The Black Hills Of Dakota and A Woman’s Touch in a rip-roaring show where the actor-musician skills on all manner of acoustic instruments add so much to the joy. Winston’s choreography peaks with the hoedown euphoria of Hoedown.
You will go wild for Coyle’s old-fashioned leading man, Wild Bill Hickok, a guitar slinger as much as a gun slinger when he sings Higher Than A Hawk, while you can feel Wilson’s smitten Gilmartin turning up the room temperature on an already warm night.
Above all, just as her mum predicted, Fletcher carries all before her as Calamity, a whip-crackin’ winner of a goodtime, goofball musical hit.
Calamity Jane, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Thursday and Saturday matinees. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.
York Dance Works dancers join Carrie Hope Fletcher on The Deadwood Stage at Grand Opera House at Calamity Jane matinee
Pink stetson gathering: Lead actress Carrie Hope Fletcher and the York Dance Works dance team on stage at the Grand Opera House, York, before Wednesday’s matinee of Calamity Jane, the 100th performance of the 2025 tour
YORK Dance Works’ adult dance team met multi-award-winning West End actress and singer Carrie Hope Fletcher to relive their ‘Deadwood Stage’ moment at the Grand Opera House on Wednesday.
That afternoon they watched Carrie playing the title role in the matinee to celebrate their love of the whip-crackin’ American musical.
Before the 2020-2021 pandemic, the dance group learned a routine to The Deadwood Stage to be performed in a showcase event. When lockdown was imposed, the team continued to learn the routine virtually, enabling the group to keep in touch and dance their way through a challenging period. The dancers eventually performed the routine live in 2022 and have not forgotten it since.
York Dance Works principal Catherine Finta says: “When we were learning the routine online, it became a highlight – to dance, chat and have a social catch-up in what was quite a lonely time.
Cast members celebrate the 100th performance of the 2025 tour of Calamity Jane with cake and balloons on the Grand Opera House stage stage on Wednesday
“Normally, we finish routines and move on to the next one, but with the stop/start uncertainty of the lockdowns, we worked on this one for longer than usual. When we were finally able to, we wanted to perform this on stage, pink stetsons and all, and finally did in summer 2022.
“When we heard Calamity Jane was coming to York, we immediately booked a dance group outing to see the fabulous Carrie Hope Fletcher and the amazing cast.”
Wednesday’s matinee also marked the 100th performance of the Calamity Jane tour. Among the cast is Samuel Holmes, who plays Francis Fryer, having last appeared at the Cumberland Street theatre in the 2012 tour of Monty Python’s Spamalot.
“I’m very excited to be doing our 100th performance, especially in such a beautiful theatre,” he says. “It’s a very special theatre with lots of special memories for me. The audiences are so amazing, and the reactions to the performances have been brilliant. So, if you can get a ticket, come down and see us as we’d love to celebrate the hoedown and the party with you”.