Picture: Matt Crockett
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie was reviewed at the Peacock Theatre, London where it runs until 23 March 2024. The tour continues until 20 July 2024.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Everybody was talking about Jamie when he hit the West End back in 2017 with a youthful exuberance and joie de vivre that defied the audience not to love him and having this life-affirming musical back in town even for just six weeks is a wonderful antidote to the woes of the world.
The show – music by The Feeling’s frontman Dan Gillespie Sells, book and lyrics by Tom MacRae, the brainchild of original director Jonathan Butterell after seeing a TV documentary about a real-life Jamie – is stopping off at the Peacock (such a perfect name for a cross-dresser) in the middle of a UK tour that kicked off last September.
It was not only fabulous fun when it began a Covid-interrupted West End run of almost four years in 2017 but in its light, frothy way an important breakthrough too by championing every young person’s right to be “different” from the perceived norm. Seven years on it is just as fresh, just as vibrant, just as relevant.
From the age of eight, the real Jamie loved dressing up in his mum’s gear and went on at 16 to fulfil his dream of becoming a drag queen despite being mercilessly bullied and derided by his classmates. After encountering so much opposition to wearing a dress to the school prom, he reckoned he had a story to tell and found a documentary maker to film it. Butterell saw the musical potential, changed the setting from Durham to Yorkshire and Jamie’s surname from Campbell to New and here we are with a much-loved, long-lasting hit that’s well worth seeing again.
Such a coincidence to find Sheffield coming to London twice in the same month with Standing at the Sky’s Edge opening just up the road at the Gillian Lynne: Jamie a love letter to “a boy who sometimes wants to be a girl”, diversity, inclusivity and being true to oneself, Sky’s Edge a love letter to the ‘Steel City’ itself.
This Jamie – the part that first made a star of Strictly Come Dancing tour champion Layton Williams – is now Ivano Turco who was plucked out of nowhere to co-star in Lloyd Webber’s semi-flop Cinderella (also at the Gillian Lynne Theatre) but has now landed a much more rewarding role which he plays and sings beautifully. He’s funny too and the nuances he finds in ‘The Wall in My Head’ made me love it even more, while the catchy ‘And You Don’t Even Know It’ is still earworming around my brain. Talking of brains, there’s a lovely line when Jamie gets told “You’re not stupid – your brain is just the wrong shape for school”.
Undoubtedly the best song – and recognised as such by its rapturous reception – belongs to Rebecca McKinnis as Jamie’s adoring, do-anything-for-him mother Margaret. It’s hard to imagine the powerful, heart-rending ‘He’s My Boy’ done better and her more reflective ‘If I Met Myself Again’, about what her life might have been had she married a better man, is equally affecting.
In contrast to the drab banality of his home life, the vivid colours and glitz of Victor’s Secret, the local drag shop, is manna from heaven to Jamie and it’s where the owner Hugo, alias Loco Chanelle in his drag-queen heyday, sorts him out with the glamorous red gown that will be his trademark as drag artist Mimi Me.
It would have been easy in that role for John Partridge to go ‘Over the Top’, Loco’s big number at the end of Act I, but the startling auburn wig and glitzy turquoise dress Dior do the job for him. The cabaret by his drag mates Laika Virgin, Sandra Bollock and Tray Sophisticay, played for all they were worth and more by Anthony Gyde, Garry Lee and David McNair, went on a bit for my liking, but I’m no drag fan and many in the house were.
Apart from a hug for his mother and a peck on the cheek for his bestie, the studious Pritti, Jamie is totally self-absorbed, but somehow Turco still makes him lovable. Talia Palamatharan as Pritti is his only real friend and they have to face up together when class bully Dean (Jordan Ricketts, not nasty enough) picks on the misfits. She sings ‘Spotlight’ and ‘It Means Beautiful’ with plenty of spark and captures the essence of the class swot while Shobna Gulati, who seems to have been Margaret’s best friend Ray forever, delivers some choice uncensored punchlines with practised relish. Giovanna Fletcher is a not-always-audible schoolmistress, while Akshay St Clair is suitably unpleasant as Jamie’s dad.
The seven-strong band under MD Danny Belton is everything it should be, and the giant special effect (I’ll say no more) that brings down the curtain on Act I, truly spectacular. Full marks to director Matt Ryan, choreographer Kate Prince and designer Anna Fleischle for a very good evening on my first visit to the Peacock.
Jeremy Chapman
SHARE THIS POST:
Comments are closed.