Emanuele Angeletti in Let It Be at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London and Touring
Let It Be continues at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London until 12 March, then on tour until 23 July.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Yes, there’s plenty of music, great music too, and, yes, Wimbledon is definitely a theatre (in fact, the SW19 venue is the eighth largest in London) but whether Let It Be, the Beatles tribute show on a six-month national tour, qualifies as ‘musical theatre’ is open to debate.
The 40-song trawl through the Beatles’ catalogue is nothing more than a concert with no attempt made at a script, or any hint of the relationship or rivalries between the four mop-haired Scousers who set the pop world alight in the 1960s.
Its one attempt at humour is the famous line John Lennon trotted out before their final song at their first Royal Variety Performance: “Will those of you in the cheaper seats clap your hands, and for the rest of you, if you would just rattle your jewellery…”
So don’t go expecting any great insights into the Fab Four but simply enjoy it for what it says on the tin: ‘A Celebration of the Music of The Beatles’.
And it’s only when you hear 40 hits one on top of the other that the breadth and durability of what they created can be truly comprehended. Such glorious gifts Lennon and McCartney had to compose songs as diverse as ‘Yesterday’, ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and the title song.
It will surprise the younger generation, but for those of us who grew old with them the evening is a nostalgic reminder of a great period in British pop culture when we not only had the Beatles but also the World Cup!
Yes, 1966 was a very good year and while England have since searched in vain to find footballers to match Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton, the Beatles’ legacy lives on in some of the most enduring pop songs ever written.
While the Beatles were in their pomp, from modest beginnings at the Cavern to giving American teens the vapours in that gigantic open-air gig at Shea Stadium and beyond, to their successful films and sad, too-early split, I was otherwise engaged in my folk phase, worshipping at the feet of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon.
It is remarkable that their songs have lasted every bit as well as those of the Beatles and the other great groups of that era, suggesting there will never be another decade quite like the 1960s.
For the chiefly middle-aged audience at Wimbledon who needed no second bidding to get on to their feet and ‘Twist and Shout’ or to sing along with the boys on ‘Hey Jude’, it was a step back in time, of fondly remembered youth.
And for the youngsters they brought with them, a pop history lesson of songwriting greatness that many would say has never been approached, let alone equalled.
The imaginative production uses plenty of video footage from the period as well as some very funny black and- white TV adverts. Whatever happened to Capstan cigarettes?
No thanks to the programme with its unhelpful all-purpose listing of eight rotating names playing the Fab Four in different weeks, but Emanuele Angeletti played Paul McCartney, Paul Canning was John Lennon, Paul Mannion was George Harrison and Luke Roberts was Ringo Starr.
A brief recorded namecheck as they took their bows was the only clue we were given as to which Beatles team we’d been watching and by then the audience was filing out. For them it was the songs that had mattered, not the singers.
The boys certainly looked the part, made the right sort of noise on guitar and sang in tune, which is more than could always be said of the real McCartney! No real acting skill was called for.
Charging £3 for a programme that neither tells the audience who is singing that night nor lists the songs is a joke but that gripe apart, this trip along Penny Lane and down Memory Lane is uncomplicated, undemanding fun – and there’s a lot to be said for that.
Jeremy Chapman
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