The Band continues at the Milton Keynes Theatre until 9 March 2019 and then on tour until 16 March.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
At the core of Take That-inspired musical The Band, currently back on tour after a stint in the West End at the end of last year, is an engaging and heartfelt story about friendship that I am sure many of this Milton Keynes audience (particularly the women) could identify with, whether aged 16 or 60.
It is as teenagers that we first meet Rachel (Faye Christall), Heather (Katy Clayton), Debbie (Rachelle Diedericks), Claire (Sarah Kate Howarth) and Zoe (Lauren Jacobs). Despite their different personalities and interests, there is one topic they all agree on: how awesome everything about The Band is.
However, at the end of one of the best nights of their lives – seeing The Band in concert – something so tragic and traumatic happens that their friendships are torn apart. At least, until 25 years later, when Rachel enters a competition to see her favourite boy band on their reunion tour in Prague and invites her old pals along.
The members of The Band were of course known to the general public well before this musical was up and running, with AJ Bentley, Nick Carsberg, Curtis T Johns, Yazdan Qafouri and Sario Solomon (also known as Five to Five) voted the winners of TV talent show Let It Shine.
Their role in Kim Gavin and Jack Ryder’s production is to create the soundtrack to the friends’ lives, and not just when playing fictional gigs.
The format is at its most successful when the boys have a physical presence onstage in ordinary domestic settings. This is particularly touching in scenes when they sing numbers alongside Rachel the teenager and her older self, still desperately missing her friends (a cracking performance from Rachel Lumberg).
In representing Rachel’s imagination, they add another dimension to the drama, whether she is shouting “louder boys” to the radio or TV when her parents are constantly arguing, or, later, by surrounding her with support when she is trying to decide if travelling to Prague is what she really wants to do.
Some of these set pieces don’t work as well as others (‘Relight My Fire’ is a bit messy) and occasionally both the staging and Gavin’s choreography are disappointingly average. But elsewhere there is great joy as the more mature ladies jet off to see their heart-throbs again (Alison Fitzjohn as Claire, Emily Joyce as Heather and Jayne McKenna as Zoe) or say a proper and poignant farewell to the dear friend they lost in such tragic circumstances.
In a cast dominated by women, Martin Miller (as Jeff, older Rachel’s partner) and Andy Williams’ Every Dave are hardly fully-rounded characters, but they are charming all the same. Williams has to pay everyone from a bus driver to a Prague policeman to a backstage techie and does so with aplomb.
Jon Bausor’s set works pretty well and some great video projections (Luke Halls) help the pace along, but overall the production values are not of the quality one would wish for.
Even Tim Firth’s dialogue falls flat at times, despite being peppered with some laugh-out-loud one-liners. What the librettist does achieve successfully though is a pretty smooth transition from book to song. There are very few moments when the placing of a number jars or seems contrived, which is quite an achievement in this context. It is also a credit to the quality pop songs Take That have written over the years (and the small but powerful onstage band led by MD John Donovan).
So, all in all, a mixed bag of a production, but one that boasts universal themes of friendship, loss, regret and love; a line-up of characters you believe in; a story with great humour and heart; and probably some of the best pop music ever written. It’s hard not to go home with a smile on your face and a tear in your eye.
Lisa Martland
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