Girl Power, streaming on Thespie.com from 17 December 2020.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
This third streamed offering in Thespie’s series of four December concerts reunites the original team from the 2018 UK tour of cult musical Six who stayed together for the show’s second spell in the West End last year.
Transferring from the Arts Theatre to the Lyric, this modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII, initially seen on the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe, was the first show to reopen earlier this month when lockdown restrictions were eased.
Unfortunately, London being bumped from Tier 2 to Tier 3 (and now Tier 4) has hit Six for six for the time being but this money-spinner will certainly be back.
Meanwhile the six Queens, Aimie Atkinson, Alexia McIntosh, Millie O’Connell, Natalie Paris, Maiya Quansah-Breed and Jarnéia (Jaye J) Richard-Noel, plus Grace Mouat, who understudied all six roles and was Dance Captain, put their considerable energies into this Girl Power stream.
The theme is the great girl bands through the decades starting with The Shirelles and the Carole King/Gerry Goffin evergreen ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ from 1960, the first black all-girl group to have a No. 1 hit. The arrangement here did not improve on the original but The Shirelles were always a hard act to follow.
Before reaching the more contemporary sound of 2011 X Factor winners Little Mix, The Supremes’ ‘Up The Ladder to the Roof’ and Labelle’s ‘Lady Marmalade’ with its suggestive French ‘voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’ chorus are nostalgic reminders of the 1970s.
They couldn’t let the 1990s go without a Spice Girls number. ‘Too Much’ was the chosen UK No. 1 – they had nine of them from only 11 singles. As somebody said: “They changed the whole game.”
The girls signed off the 40-minute show with ‘Power’, not one of Little Mix’s four No. 1s but in a programme devoted to the empowerment and unity of women, the absolutely appropriate finale to a feast of strong rock voices, the deep, raunchy McIntosh the one leaving the biggest impression.
Jeremy Chapman
Oops! I Streamed It Again, streaming on Thespie.com from 10 December 2020.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
The title is a pun on Britney Spears’ ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ and that hit from 2000 kicked off the second edition of Thespie’s Reunited series – this the reunion of five stars of & Juliet, the 2019 West End musical due to resume on 12 March next year if Covid allows.
The show is a modern take on Romeo and Juliet posing the question: what if Juliet had not died at the end? Cassidy Janson, one of three from the show to win an Olivier Award, is reunited with her stage “husband” Oliver Tompsett – they play William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway – as well as Jordan Luke Gage, Grace Mouat and Tim Mahendran.
This quintet perform an interesting mix of classic pop rock, contemporary musical theatre and one from the cinema – ‘Kissing You’, beautifully sung by Mouat, from Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet movie, the + sign presumably to indicate the director had taken a liberty or two with Mr Shakespeare’s hallowed text.
There are some other nice moments – David Bowie would surely have approved of Gage’s classy take on ‘Life on Mars?’, Mahendran’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ elicits our sympathy while anything Tompsett sings is always worth listening to. He has one of purest voices in musical theatre.
There are numbers from Rock of Ages, Beautiful (Janson played Carole King in that long runner), Wicked (Tompsett had a long run as Fiyero) and Hadestown – it was good to catch up on some songs from musicals I missed.
The fourth show in the series, All I Want for Christmas is Theatre, launches on 21 December with a cast of 20-plus.
Jeremy Chapman
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