All Growed Up – Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Dara McNaughton and company in All Growed Up at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. Picture: Chris Hill

All Growed Up, performed by the British Youth Music Theatre, was reviewed at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Growing up is hard to do. A truism never more apt than in Northern Ireland during the long years of The Troubles. That protracted, not yet fully resolved, conflict serves as the background to a trilogy of musicals based on Tony Macaulay’s memoirs presented by British Youth Music Theatre and culminating at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre with All Growed Up.

Following 2018’s Paperboy and 2022’s Breadboy, it finds Macaulay, raised in the exclusive Protestant heartland of Belfast’s Shankill Road, reaching his maturity as the first in his family to go to university. There he encounters others from different backgrounds and perspectives that his home city’s euphemistic ‘peace walls’ had inoculated him from. With old certainties challenged and new opportunities presented, All Growed Up describes a coming of age not just for Macaulay, but for Northern Ireland itself.

Where the first two iterations were written by Andrew Doyle and composed by Duke Special, those duties are taken now by Dean Johnson (co-director of those instalments and here sole director) and composer Shauna Carrick.

Spanning the decade from 1972, the trilogy ends in 1985 with Macaulay wholly transformed from the paperboy first encountered, newly bestowed with a degree, engaged to be married, and on the vertiginous precipice of adulthood.

Large, serious and difficult themes, personal and political, are dealt with in All Growed Up, which perhaps explains why it doesn’t feel as sure or as focused as what came before. Where Johnson’s book and lyrics err on the side of comedic local colour and the romantic to somewhat uneven effect, Carrick’s score exalts in a generous surfeit of melodically attractive and energetic numbers, albeit none of them, with the exception of the reiterated title song, lingering long in the mind beyond the rousing finale.

There is no faulting the energy and enthusiasm of the 36-strong cast of young performers, several of whom in lead and supporting roles surely deserve credit for their endeavours that the programme booklet listing denies them. Similarly the haphazard acknowledgement of the accomplished onstage band.

Problems throughout with diction and clarity are hindered by the surely unnecessary use, given the size of the onstage band and the Lyric’s intimate space, of head-mics. The occasionally unfocused staging isn’t helped by a tendency to over-excitability and Johnson’s doubling as writer and director, neither persona sufficiently tasking the other. It’s left to Gyasi Sheppy’s buoyant choreography to provide the evening with its standout set pieces.

Worthy of mention is Dara McNaughton’s engaging Macaulay. Not yet vocally secure and with a physical awkwardness in need of smoothing out, he provides even so an agreeable focus and pivot for proceedings. Love interest Lesley is delivered with aplomb by Eva Beveridge in one of the most finished performances of the evening.

There’s much pleasure to be gained from the robust commitment of Oli Armstrong as Macaulay’s friend, from the clever and confident performance of Joel Woodshore’s actor-manqué Byron, from university landlady, Mrs Flood, played with a knowingness beyond Cara Stewart’s own maturity, and from the warm but waspish grandmother of Eimear Gallagher, her gleeful “Guess who’s died?” deservedly getting the evening’s biggest laugh as her apparition glories in the prospect of posthumously announcing her own demise.

Laced with local humour, All Growed Up’s thumbnail portrait of a more difficult time in Northern Ireland’s recent history also serves as an example that change is possible, not least when youth and optimism are allowed to take centre stage; a message delivered with winning brio by the committed vigour of the young ensemble.

Michael Quinn