Crush – Belgrade Theatre, Coventry and Touring

Sara Crowe, Georgia Oldman, James Meunier, Rosemary Ashe and Kirsty Malpass in Crush at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry and Touring. Picture: Robert Day

Crush continues at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry until 19 September. The show will then play at Theatre Royal Brighton (22–26 September) and Richmond Theatre (29 September–3 October).

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

It’s 1963 and we’re at the Dame Dorothea Dosserdale School for Girls. The old liberal order has changed with the arrival of a new tyrannical headmistress, Miss Bleacher. On the surface then, Crush, a new musical by Maureen Chadwick and Kath Gotts, appears to be in safe Malory Towers/Daisy Pulls It Off territory.  That is until we learn that two of the schoolgirls, Susan (Stephanie Clift) and Camilla (Charlotte Miranda-Smith), have, it seems, fallen in love… Suddenly St Trinian’s feels a long way off.

The decision to put same sex relationships at the heart of a musical is refreshingly brave, and even in a wonderfully tolerant country like the UK, you could still feel a frisson in the audience as they realised that the main love affairs in this show were going to be of the lesbian variety.  The decision to challenge the audience in this way, and to face up to another type of love, is very much to be applauded.

However, the problem with Crush is that it doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Most of the time we are truly in the world of jolly hockey sticks, as evidenced by one of the show’s better songs, ‘Navy Knicks’. Even the set, by David Farley, with its colourless pen and ink, cardboard cut-out style design creates a cartoon-like, two-dimensional dynamic.

It’s therefore incredibly hard to take the love story seriously. Accused of ‘inappropriate behaviour’, Susan and Camilla run away to London, where Camilla immediately falls in love with a bloke, leaving Susan to realise she actually loved another schoolgirl, Daimler. She is so distraught she considers suicide, but through a bizarre dream sequence in The Stairways (the holy grail of lesbian nightclubs) featuring Marlene Dietrich no less, she realises life is worth living. She heads back to school and, after protestations from Daimler that it “just won’t work”, all it takes is a bit of a bouncy song and dance number, ‘You Do Do the Magic’, to get them back together. This is probably the craziest 20 minutes of musical theatre I have ever seen.

For me, Crush is at its best when it’s not trying to be serious, and if you just go with it, there is some real fun to be had. My favourite character was schoolgirl Brenda (played with relish by Georgia Oldman) who acts as the Headmistress’ sneaky spy. Whenever she’s on stage the show is genuinely joyous.

There are also good performances from Sara Crowe as the spiffingly nice schoolmistress, Miss Austin, and Brianna Ogunbawo as Daimler. But the absolute highlight comes at the end, when evil Headmistess Miss Bleacher, superbly realised by Rosemary Ashe, is forced to step down. As she leaves, she sings the defiant, yet hilarious anthem ‘I Ask For Nothing’. Magic.

Staging new musicals is a tricky business, and fair play to the Belgrade and Big Broad Productions for giving this show a shot. It’s definitely worth seeing, and musical theatre aficionados will enjoy debating which parts of the show work, and which don’t.

Jack Rolfe

www.bigbroad.co.uk/productions/crush-the-musical

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