Music Review: The Little Big Things – Original West End Cast Recording

The Little Big Things – Original West End Cast Recording (available digitally worldwide and on CD from @sohoplace).

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

If there’s one West End musical I would cheerfully pay to see once a month until the end of the year then it’s The Little Big Things, a show with its heart in the right place Sadly that won’t be possible because the extended run of this surprise hit at the delightful @sohoplace ends on 2 March 2024.

The consolation for those who will be pining for it is that we can now buy the cast album as a vibrant reminder of what, in the best possible way, a very different musical TLBT was and is and how wonderfully Nick Butcher and Tom Ling’s predominantly pop-rock score was sung and played, with special mention to musical director Laura Bangay and her six helpers who drove proceedings along at a great clip.

Released on 5 January, it jumped straight away to No. 1 on the soundtrack charts and will prove a lasting souvenir of a truly remarkable musical. It’s a true story (book by Joe White) about the transformative power of family, about taking the positive from disaster and running with it, about a young athlete’s determination not to let a wheelchair dominate his life but to spur him to international success in a different direction, as an acclaimed mouth artist, inspirational speaker and best-selling author.

Henry Fraser was 17 and being talked up as a future England rugby player when he suffered a diving accident on holiday in Portugal and would never walk again. With huge support from family, tough-love staff, physio Agnes (the sublime Amy Trigg) and Dr Graham (Malinda Parris) and girlfriend Katie (Gracie McGonigal), he defies predictions by wheeling himself out of hospital staff a year early and sets about adapting himself to taking on the big wide world from a wheelchair. How he does it so triumphantly makes for a rewarding if teary experience.

Fraser post-accident is played by Ed Larkin, who was born with cerebral palsy and is the first wheelchair actor to lead a West End show; Trigg, the physio, was born with spina bifida and is not only a sensational actress but a successful writer too; and McGonigal, like Trigg a Mountview graduate, has not allowed a congenital limb deficiency to spoil her dream of becoming a West End actress. She has a bionic arm but does not use it as Katie.

If you were being picky, you might say there isn’t a ‘great’ song in The Big Little Things but there are plenty of good, intelligent ones that all drive the narrative forward. The Act I closer ‘The World is Waiting For You’ is probably the most memorable, certainly the most inspiring, as his family sing “Everywhere you go we’ll be waiting/We’ll save a place at every game” and there’s a lovely line, “black is all the colours mixed back together again” in the big family number ‘Guide You’ towards the end.

Vocally it’s a great team effort, with West End stalwart Linzi Hateley’s duet with Trigg on ‘Part of the Plan’ as Henry’s mother, a bluesy Parris’ ‘Work of Heart’, a cracking number about overworked, unafraid and underpaid nurses, and the boating ballad ‘Miles and Miles’, nostalgically sung by Alasdair Harvey as Henry’s father, all staying fondly in the mind. The two Henrys, the fine-voiced Jonny Amies and Larkin, work brilliantly too, together and separately. Hang on, three times isn’t enough – I need to see it again!

Jeremy Chapman