Fame – The Musical – Palace Theatre, Manchester and Touring

Picture: Tristram Kenton

Fame – The Musical at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, then touring until 17 August 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

There’s something about Fame that clearly endures. While the road to stardom was a rocky one for the students of New York’s High School of Performing Arts, each fictional incarnation – Alan Parker’s 1980 film, the hugely successful TV show it spawned and the stage show that appeared in 1988, which were all masterminded by producer David De Silva – has continued to resonate with audiences long after the legwarmer stopped being fashionable and Irene Cara’s title song topped the charts.

You would think that after decades of seeing the hopes and dreams of pop wannabes paraded on our screens in the name of Saturday night entertainment that the appetite for such antics would have waned. But there’s something refreshing about going back to the phenomenon that started it all.

And while some versions of the stage show, which has a book by Jose Fernandez that apes the film in some respects but diverges in others and – in a clever, meta touch – takes places in a world where that movie exists, have tried to modernise it, this big-budget, handsomely mounted Selladoor production places events squarely in the early 1980s, in a period when fame-hungry wannabes weren’t quite so prevalent.

Add a spot-on cast brimming with triple threat performers and marshalled with unfailing energy by director/choreographer Nick Winston – reaching its foot-tapping peak during the flamenco-infused ‘The Junior Festival’ sequence – and the result means this touring version might possibly be the best stage incarnation yet.

The pace and fluidity to the scenes in which the principals are introduced, soundtracked by the A Chorus Line-aping ‘Hard Work’ and played out in front of designer Morgan Large’s wall of gawky yearbook headshots, is kept up for the whole running time.

Winning performances from Molly McGuire as the endearingly geeky Serena – who turns Steve Margoshes and Jacques Levy’s serviceable songs ‘Let’s Play a Love Scene’ and ‘Think of Meryl Streep’ into genuine showstoppers – and Hayley Johnston, doing wonders with the potentially cartoonish role of ‘overweight’ dancer Mabel, make you care about the students, even though we’ve now heard stories like theirs a million times. Which means the potentially mawkish ensemble funeral number ‘Bring on Tomorrow’ has real poignancy and heart.

Soul star Mica Paris looks a little uncomfortable in her early scenes as the formidable Miss Sherman and in her wordy duet, ‘Teacher’s Argument’, with Katie Warsop’s dance teacher Miss Bell. But she comes into her own with a note-perfect, gospel-inflected version of Act II’s ‘These Are My Children’ that prompts a well-deserved standing ovation long before the curtain call.

Speaking of which, Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford’s perennially catchy title song, which isn’t performed in full until the spirited finale, is still the show’s best song by a country mile. That the production manages to make the proceeding songs almost match it is testament to the talent of the cast and creative team involved.

This version certainly flies. And, as a property, all the signs are that it could very well live forever.

Chris Bartlett