Laura Baldwin in Singin’ in the Rain at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. Picture: Johan Persson
Singin’ in the Rain continues at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester until 25 January 2026.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Raz Shaw’s vibrant staging of Singin’ in the Rain starts simply. A coat and hat alone on stage. Don Lockwood (Louis Gaunt) steps in, taps out a few quick steps, then slips into his film star persona.
We are transported to 1920s Hollywood – a place where image matters more than truth.
Well we were, until an official-looking person in a lanyard walked on stage announcing that there would be no drums during the performance as the drummer had been taken ill and not to worry if the music sounded a bit “different”.
The fourth wall well and truly broken, it was hard to take my eyes away from the (totally heroic) musical director gesticulating wildly and, well, making the very best of a bad situation. Should they have announced it or should they have tried their best and hoped nobody would notice? Hard to say. But imagine staging an entire show more or less about tap-dancing without a drum. Anyway, they managed.
The musical, a comment on fame and phoniness, leans into its aims with charm. Gaunt looks the movie star part beautifully and Laura Baldwin is dazzling as his screechy co-star Lina Lamont. They’re both totally believable heartthrobs. Kathy Selden is played by an understated Carly Mercedes Dyer, who quietly disrupts the status quo. Baldwin’s Lina is nasal, shrill and utterly mesmerising. Singing out of tune when you can clearly belt like Mariah is never an easy feat.
It can be difficult to fully immerse in a show in the round. Short of blocking the fire exits, everything’s always going to be on display. But the intimacy makes up for it. We’re invited to be part of the audience at the premiere and we’re baited by the actors. The excellent choreography (Alistair David), naturally, plays a key part in this. When Don finally dances through the downpour before the interval, Gaunt plays with the audience, daring the audience to join in in a clever take on an iconic moment.
Dyer is perhaps a bit too subtle against the backdrop of hammy (in all the right ways) Lina and Cosmo (played with comedic ebullience by Danny Collins). Maybe this reflects her role as someone quietly brilliant who’s been overlooked, but at times I feel she could have done more. She came close to this in ‘Good Morning’, before somehow retreating for the rest of the show. It is this subtlety and the lack of chemistry between Dyer and Gaunt, who needs to match Collins and Baldwin’s campness a bit more, that makes some of the show a little flat. Their final romantic number, ‘You Are My Lucky Star’, almost fizzles out after all the excitement that precedes it.
Technically, however, the show is faultless. The silent movie scenes are delivered innovatively, the dream sequence is simultaneously spooky and dazzling and the rain dance scene, well you’ll have to see for yourself, but you wouldn’t want to miss it (unless you’d just blowdried your hair).
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