Picture: Darren Bell
Forever Plaid continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 27 June 2021.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Stewart Ross’ 1992 musical gives us four young men who met at high school somewhere in America in the 1950s. They form a part-time harmony group called Forever Plaid. En route to their first proper gig they are killed by a coach carrying a party of nuns on their way to a Beatles concert. That’s the back story.
Now in 2021, they are back from the dead, landed like aliens in what to them seems like a foreign country, surprised to find they can still sing and, of course, they have a show to do – if they can remember it.
So they don their tuxedos and plaid cummerbunds and get started. It’s a quirky, witty vehicle for what is effectively, a concert of 1950s music.
The four young actors are an impressive, immaculately choreographed (by Racky Plews) quartet. They sing beautifully with impeccable diction and near perfect intonation.
The songs range from Perry Como to a hilarious account of ‘Perfidia’, taking in lots of parodies and arrangements along the way.
These four can do gospel, barbershop, patter, calypso and a lot more. The three-minute take on the Ed Sullivan show is gloriously silly and funny. We even get ‘Scotland the Brave’ at one point.
And it will be a long time before I forget the bass richness of Christopher Short singing a spiritual. Let’s hear and see a lot more of him very soon please
MD Ian Oakley who provides accompaniment on keys alongside Jess Martin on double bass, has done a fine job. His four singers are very responsive to each other and the musical cohesion is unusually good.
This is, actually, the third revival by Ovation at Upstairs at the Gatehouse which launched with Forever Plaid in 1998. Director John Plews decided it would be a good post-lockdown comeback show because the small cast makes distancing much easier.
At a time when many of us are just getting back inside theatres after such a long period of deprivation this entertaining, 80-minute show is a bit of a treat.
Susan Elkin
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