West End Musical Drive-In Goes Digital, available via Stream.Theatre until 21 March 2021.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Anything that gives musical theatre fans the opportunity to see a live show in these endless days of deprivation is to be applauded even if, in this case, it involves driving to an open-air car park in north London on a filthy night.
Drive-in cinemas are a big deal in the States but drive-in concerts on this side of the pond are in their infancy, so this series of five songfests featuring present and future musical theatre stars is a very worthwhile idea.
Digitalising those concerts and streaming them into people’s front rooms rather takes the adventure out of the enterprise but on the other hand it does raise more money for the promoters and artists. And it does save on petrol!
Singin’ in the rain in this first session and making light of a make-do stage that grew ever more slippery as the show wore on (it had to be wiped dry during the intermission) were four young performers who have all tasted West End success.
Layton Williams has been a knockout lead in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie while the three feisty female artists, Shan Ako (Eponine in Les Misérables), Maiya Quansah-Breed (Catherine Parr in Six) and Shanay Holmes (Rent, The Bodyguard), were making their marks until Covid so rudely interrupted.
Williams, the first mixed race Billy Elliot and Angel in Rent before his Jamie triumph, had some exotic costume changes including some skintight black PVC pants that left little to the imagination as he waded into such showstoppers as ‘I’ll Cover You’ and ‘ABC’.
With help from the Jamie ensemble, his powerful ‘Wall in My Head’ provoked a chorus of car horns that served as a substitute for applause until the audience was encouraged out of their cars and into the rain to do a bit of dancing of their own.
A fellow Jamie, Noah Thomas, came up to join Williams at the end for ‘Out of the Darkness’. Not only strong on vocals, Layton’s a very flexible dancer and a triple-threat who doesn’t believe in understatement.
Singer-songwriter Ako not only gave us a stunning ‘She Used to Be Mine’, the 11 o’clock number from Waitress, and Tina’s ‘Simply The Best’ but used the occasion to promote her EP Brave Heart. If the title number is a good guide, the rest will be worth hearing.
‘Burn’ from Hamilton and ‘Proud Mary’ from Tina The Musical were Quansah-Breed at her best – and her best is pretty sensational – while the versatile Holmes not only sang her heart out, she also co-produced and hosted the 105-minute socially-distanced show.
Belting out ‘One Night Only’ from Dreamgirls and the Golden Globe-winning ‘This Is Me’, the anthem sung by the Bearded Lady in The Greatest Showman empowering those who are ostracised because they are different, Holmes frequently asked the audience “Are you having fun?”
Faced with four enthusiastic performers giving it plenty of welly and meeting the adversity of a damp evening with a big smile, plenty of pizzazz and a show of strength so typical of the way theatreland has dealt head-on with crisis after crisis, it was a rhetorical question. They dared you NOT to enjoy it!
This lively West End Musical Brunch series, filmed at Troubadour Meridian Water in Enfield, is being promoted by stream.theatre with each show onsite for three days at weekends until 21 March.
Jeremy Chapman
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