Summer Street – Waterloo East Theatre

Myke Cotton and Sarah-Louise Young in Summer Street at Waterloo East Theatre, London. Picture: Simon Snashall

Summer Street continues at Waterloo East Theatre, London until 2 June 2019.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Neighbours was a global television phenomenon. Reg Watson’s suburban soap opera involved families who felt much more relatable than his previous soaps Sons and Daughters and The Young Doctors.

In the UK, the early-evening broadcast on BBC1 helped propel Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan into mega stardom, while its beach-set rival Home and Away did much the same for Kylie’s sister Dannii.

It is that world that is the setting for Summer Street, a new musical with book, lyrics and music by Andrew Norris. In his world of the “soapies”, Summer Street was a long-running soap whose cast are returning for a one-off reunion, five years after cancellation.

Such a scenario, featuring elements behind as well as on camera, could prove fruitful, as the Hollywood comedy Soapdish, long rumoured to being developed into a full-scale musical by Stiles and Drewe, has shown.

But Summer Street is no Soapdish. Norris (who also directs and produces, as well as possessing a programme headshot larger than any of his cast) does at least lean in to Fringe theatre’s budgetary restrictions, concocting a reason why a large-cast soap opera is being re-created by just four actors.

Other creative decisions are more questionable. Suggesting that Summer Street the soap included musical numbers is an unnecessary step for Summer Street the musical. Some of the numbers are presented by the actors’ soap characters, but others are not, making Norris’s decision irrelevant.

It would help if the songs were of a higher standard. One can forgive the soap’s title song for being simplistic and repetitive as being typical of the genre. But the same can also be said of most of the show’s other numbers. While the pop music of the era was characterised by catchy choruses repeated ad nauseam, the demands of theatre require more from such numbers.

Norris’ cast does their best, particularly Sarah-Louise Young as Angie, the actress who has found herself working on a supermarket fish counter ever since being sacked from the soap years ago. Young plunders every line to find the comedy within, finding laughter in places one might otherwise struggle. It helps that one of her soap characters, “Sheila Aussie”, feels freshly ripped from a Kath & Kim rerun.

Young is also saddled with a character, Bobbi, who is more interested in car mechanics than make-up. That she comes out as gay is the sort of storyline that might have been used in the late 1990s; 20 years later, though, audiences deserve a portrayal of such a storyline to have something to say, rather than be mentioned and then forgotten.

Young’s castmates Myke Cotton, Julie Clare and Simon Snashall (the latter bravely battling with a voice that has, wisely, given up and gone home) likewise struggle to bring life to a leaden script. Their work prevents Summer Street from being the worst show this reviewer has ever seen at the Waterloo East, but it remains in contention.

But if nothing else, the failure of this show despite the best efforts of the cast does at least indicate that a musical set among the backstage shenanigans of a TV show has potential. Now, if someone can just persuade Stiles and Drewe to finish Soapdish…

Scott Matthewman