Summer in the City – Upstairs at the Gatehouse

Candis Butler Jones and Eliza Shea in Summer in the City at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London. Picture: Darren Bell

Summer in the City continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 15 January 2023.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Jennifer Selway gives us six characters who meet in a Carnaby Street coffee bar (remember those?) in 1965. One is a journalist, another an aspirant art student and a third a traffic warden. The coffee bar is owned by a wise, older woman and a young American man works for her. Then a Liverpudlian wannabe photographer falls through the door.

Gradually this sextet become friends with various relationships and tensions between them, forming a surprisingly coherent narrative considering that it’s a jukebox musical driven by the musical numbers.

All the acting and singing is strong and the five-piece band, seated at one end of the well used traverse space, does a splendid job led by Curtis Lavender on keys (or sometimes sax or guitar). I particularly liked their ‘Nut Rocker’ – an arrangement of part of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker by Kim Fowley at the beginning of the second half.

Joanna (Eliza Shea), Cassie (Candis Butler Jones) and Vera (Elizabeth Walker) form a girl band managed by Sam (Connor Arnold – fine actor-muso) who doesn’t see his long term future in serving coffee. Each girl has a different reason for doing this but as a trio they make a good sound and achieve some success. And Helen Goldwyn (another pleasing singer) brings gravitas and balance as Hetty who used to perform during the war with her late husband.

But really outstanding is Harry Curley as Bobby. He’s a 2022 graduate from Rose Bruford and is vibrantly strong as well as engagingly natural. Curley’s rendering of ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ is an energetic show-stopper. He can also do lyrical, accompanying himself evocatively on acoustic guitar for ‘Ferry Cross the Mersey’.

Selway, who has worked with the Gatehouse’s John Plews (who has directed and devised the piece) a lot over the years, makes the book witty – which is why it works so well. There are some good, often rueful, jokes.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could carry phones with us instead of relying on phone boxes?”

“Rock and Roll doesn’t last. It isn’t as though the Rolling Stones are going to be performing in their seventies is it?”

“Why can’t you go to college? Surely you don’t have to pay tuition fees in this country?”

And of course the knowing audience smiles each time it hears a song coming on. Obviously Walker eventually sings ‘Bobbie’s Girl’ and we can all relax because as Hetty remarks: “We all like a happy ending.”

Great fun and well worth catching if you can.

Susan Elkin