Teacher Miss Hedge (Katie Spencer) steps in between school bully Dean Paxton (Cain Branton) and dreamer Jamie New (Frankie Bounds) in York Stage’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie
THIRD time, even luckier. After York Stage’s Teen Version at Theatre@41 in June 2023 and Pick Me Up Theatre’s Joseph Rowntree Theatre run in July 2025, Sheffield musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is being re-made in York for the third time.
This one is the best yet, wholly justifying Nik Briggs’s decision to revisit Tom MacRae and Dan Gillespie Sells’ musical after directing the York premiere in 2023. “When the full version became available I knew I had to bring it to the Grand Opera House,” he said, promising a “truly beautiful, bold and gritty new production, capturing the electricity, humour and heart that has made ‘Jamie’ a modern British classic”.
Electricity. Tick. Humour. Tick. Heart. Tick, tick, ticker. They are all here in abundance in a production driven by Briggs’s thrilling direction, bold and beautiful performances and A J Powell’s choreography, full of punch and panache. What lifts it even higher, to five- star status, is Briggs’s costume and especially set design.
In a story so fast moving, where Jamie’s life is always on the edge of being out of control, where he wants to run before he can strut in heels, Briggs’s revolving stage is the perfect way to encapsulate the commotion. It enables the next scene to be set up out of sight, in transitions from Mayfield School classroom to Jamie’s house; classroom to Victor’s Secret clothes shop; a street bench to Jamie’s house; outside Legs Eleven nightclub to inside.
Nik Briggs: Director-designer of York Stage’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie
There is no need for stage hands to be in view, save to push the merry-go-round for the next triangular stage to lock into place. It is so quick and efficient that the only things not to be on the move are the hands of the classroom clock. Then again, time waits for no man, or rather teenage boy in this case.
After Ryan Addyman, at the age of 17 in 2023, and Harvey Stephens, at 15 in 2025, now 16-year-old Sheffield council estate schoolboy Jamie New is played by Huby professional actor Frankie Bounds, who is fully ten years older than Harvey at 25, but still boyish of frame, cherubic in his cheekiness and lithe of limb to complement boundless mischievous energy and singing skills honed by his training in both opera and musical theatre.
Inspired by the Firecracker documentary Jamie: Drag Queen At 16, composer Gillespie Sells (from Horsham pop practitioners The Feeling) and writer/lyricist MacRae draw on an original idea by co-writer Jonathan Butterell for the unapologetic story of the boy who sometimes wants to be a girl, wear a dress to the school prom and be a drag queen in this classic teen rebel story.
Withering wit, northern nous and sassy social awareness all pepper their unflinching account of societal and classroom attitudes towards gender, bigotry, bullying, homophobia, absentee fathers and the right to self-expression. Nine years on from the Sheffield Crucible premiere, post-Covid strictures and the rise of right-wing intolerance, ‘Jamie’ hits home all the harder.
Mum Margaret New (Joanne Theaker), left, and friend Ray (Julie-Ann Smith) organising the 16th birthday party for Jamie (Frankie Bounds) in York Stage’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie
Significantly, every Jamie putdown of loathsome, self-loathing school bully Dean Paxton (Cain Branton) is met with cheers, cheers that grew even louder to greet Bounds’ exit from the Stage Door after Saturday’s matinee. Likewise, Jamie’s best friend, assured York Stage debutante Roxanne Hall’s Priti Pasha, the Muslim student destined to study Medicine at Cambridge, puts dunderhead Dean in his place too. This bravura musical not only celebrates difference but what a difference for the better it makes too.
Among the Year 11 pupils of Mayfield School, a typical northern comprehensive classroom of hope-filled, yet cynical and unruly 16-year-olds, Bounds’ Jamie is a restless Yorkshire dreamer in need of escape. He wants to be a performer, not the fork lift driver his career advisor suggests.
Breaking rules and hearts alike, this lippy kid in lip gloss is outwardly confident but he is naive and vulnerable too, wounded by the barbs of his stay-away father (Adam Thompson) and discouraged by his narrow-minded teacher Miss Hedge (Katie Spencer).
The grit promised by Briggs is delivered through the kitchen-sink drama frankness not only of blinkered teacher and bigoted father but also of Jamie’s world-weary, self-sacrificial, ever-supportive mum Margaret (Joanne Theaker, whose rendition of heartfelt ballad He’s My Boy is the Act Two show-stopper).
Class act: Frankie Bounds in his glittering yet shattering performance as teenager Jamie New at the heart of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie
High quality is guaranteed by the presence of both Theaker and Julie-Ann Smith’s Ray, who brings a sharp tongue and kind heart to every domestic drama. Together they form a formidably forthright duo taking on both authority and convention.
To go with the grit, here comes the glitz and bravado of dress-shop boss Hugo/veteran drag act Loco Chanelle (Grant McIntyre) and the drag-queen veterans Sandra Bollock (Thompson’s second role), Tray Sophisticay (George Cornell, reprising his Teen Version role) and Laika Virgin (the thoroughly fabulous Stu Hutchinson), in Sheffield’s answer to The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.
Supporting roles and ensemble cast are in fine form too, as is Jessica Viner’s band, where James Lolley’s trumpet is particularly potent. Briggs has hit new heights in his director-designer double whammy, bringing out the best in his cast, boosted by Powell’s fabulous choreography, where even the cans on a schoolroom table dance in rhythm.
York Stage presents Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.
Year 11 pupils, led by Frankie Bounds’ Jamie New in red nail varnish, turn the classroom into a dancefloor of defiance in York Stage’s Everybody’s Talking About Jamie