The Gardening Club – New Wimbledon Theatre

The Gardening Club A New Musical was reviewed at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

The evening did not start well. The walk in teeming rain from Wimbledon Station to the theatre was bad enough. The ten-minute queue at the theatre with everyone getting wetter by the second was worse. And when finally through security we were squashed like sardines in the corridor for 15 minutes waiting to be allowed into the auditorium.

At this point some were asking themselves: why have we given up a good night on TV for this? Because of “technical issues” it was another long wait before the action started 20 minutes late, and clearly tech problems had not been solved: someone’s mic didn’t work, there was a lighting glitch, an unwanted buzzy noise could be heard and the music now and again overpowered the voices.

So congratulations to an inexperienced cast, mainly from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, several making their professional debut, for coming through this baptism of fire and giving us a show that eventually made up for its bad start with a strong Act II.

The Gardening Club, the first musical by Americans Carleigh McRitchie and Bella Wright who met at LIPA and founded Nowhere Girls Theatre last year, has already enjoyed success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and spent a week at the 80-seater Wimbledon Studio in September. But this was stepping up to the big league, a one-night outing at the 1,670-seat Wimbledon Theatre, a daunting challenge even without the hiccups. It meant a great deal to the fledgling company and was a crying shame it did not get off to a better start.

It’s an important subject. In 1960s Georgia, five young ladies open a ‘gardening club’ as a front for an illegal drugs ring at a time when the birth control pill is banned to all but married women. They were pioneers of women’s lib although they didn’t know it. We meet Phoebe, the ringleader, an ambitious reporter on the local Savannah Sun; Betty, the widowed nurse; Sheila, wife of the paper’s unlovely news editor; and two sisters, the outgoing Maggie and the more naive Vicki.

There’s a nice twist in Act II when Phoebe is sent to cover her own scam but too many storylines stop us getting to know each of the quintette closely – the pop-rock score often slows down the narrative, less would be more – but the budding romance between Vicki and Miles, one of the few likeable men, provides two excellent numbers. ‘I’d Turn the Page’ and ‘Teach You to Touch Me’. Lola Garlick and Richie Paisley go well together as the lovebirds and for me their gentle interplay is the best thing about the show.

The wistful ballad ‘Someday’, sung by all five women, is a keeper and the biggest cheer is for ‘Betty’s Happy Ending’ when the widow belatedly discovers she doesn’t need a man to have an orgasm. It’s noisy, funny and rather crude and the audience lapped it up. Olivia Taylor-Quinn as Betty has a big voice and a good one but it does tend to smother the other four.

The men, often one-dimensional, are given a tough time but their one team effort ‘The Perks of Being a Man’ hits the spot. It is another good number by talented songwriters McRitchie and Wright but there are a couple of others that could be jettisoned. The much-improved Act II suggests there’s the embryo of a decent musical here although a stronger hand on the tiller than director Tara Noonan’s might be needed and a more polished cast.

At the moment, The Gardening Club has nowhere to go so it’s back to the workshop and a general tightening up. McRitchie and Wright need more funding to take it forward. Only a baby, it deserves a longer life.

Jeremy Chapman