Review: NOW That’s What I Call A Musical at The Lyceum, Sheffield


Out of a swirling mist of dry ice and twinkling rhinestones, like an ageless goddess beamed onto a stage in Tudor Square by alien error, steps… Sinitta.
Not as a pre-recorded sequence or magic mirror-style filmed projection. Here in Sheffield, for one week only, is the actual real life Sinitta, stunning at 60 and sheathed yet again in the palm leaves she made infamous on X Factor.
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Hide Ad“Oh my God,” gasps Goodness Gracious Me and EastEnders star Nina Wadia, echoing the thoughts of all of us, as she takes on the role of lead character Gemma in new show NOW That’s What I Call A Musical making its world premiere at the Lyceum until Saturday.


“Just me, baby,” breathes Sinitta, before launching like a powerhouse into her 1985 hit So Macho complete with awesome armography.
The show, fresh to Sheffield as first stop on its inaugural UK tour, camp as a Strictly Christmas Special thanks to Craig Revel Horwood as its director and choreographer, has been created in celebration of 40 years of the chart-topping juggernaut compilation albums Now That’s What I Call Music.
But it’s the 80s and early 90s on which it focuses, the era from which everyone can remember what number NOW album was their first. And so within a stage framed by huge grey plastic cassette mix tapes comes an unrelenting score of non-stop smash hits.
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Hide AdRelax, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Tainted Love, Video Killed the Radio Star, Respect by Erasure, Heart of Glass, Walking on Sunshine, Relight My Fire… every song is guaranteed to press an immediate Sony Walkman rewind to the days of your youth.


The plot follows a pretty familiar course. At school, best pals Gemma and April – played by Sheffield’s own Melissa Jacques, and brilliantly as teenage ‘Younger April’ by new talent Maia Hawkins, making an astonishing professional debut after graduating only last year – thought they would be friends forever, that not even April’s ambitions to break the big time in LA could tear them apart.
But when the girls lose touch it takes a school reunion 20 years on to bring them back together, and force them to confront the realities of where their lives have led them.
Just like the Take That musical Greatest Days before it, and to a similar extent I Should Be So Lucky the Musical in which Jacques also appeared, it’s a bittersweet story of growing up, of female friendship, of hopes and dreams and life’s habit of getting in the way of them, and a celebration of the power of pop to provide the soundtrack to a lifetime.
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Hide AdWritten by comedian Pippa Evans, the story begins in Birmingham in 2009, where the Sparkhill High Class of 89 are regathering in local pub The Palace.


“Everyone looks the same… but saggy,” observes Gemma. A former classmate sobs in the ladies’ loos that she hates reunions because they make you face up to the truth of what you are.
“What’s that?” asks Gemma. “Drunk,” comes the reply.
There’s a pathos to the direction and the laugh-out-loud dialogue, and to the song choices woven through the script. When Wadia walks anguished and unseen between new groom Tim and her younger self – a likeable Nikita Johan – with all the knowledge of the wounds 20 years of unhappy marriage have wrought, it’s a deeply powerful scene.
The lyrics of Spandau Ballet’s Gold used as spoken word by money-obsessed Tim is a stroke of genius, and Chris Grahamson plays Gemma’s other half perfectly as part husband, part panto villain.
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Hide AdHawkins’ crystal clear vocals on an arresting new arrangement of Everybody Wants to Rule the World bring a moving Marilyn Monroe-esque tragic heroine quality to the part of April’s younger self, and elsewhere the harmonising between Hawkins and Johal is exquisite.
Some things don’t gel quite so well. Twenty years does not seem sufficiently long to accurately reflect the two main characters’ story arcs, or for accomplished actors Wadia and Jacques to be given the disservice of being believably aged just 38 by the time of a reunion set in 2009. Both bring a life-lived poignancy to their parts which deserves to be acknowledged rather than fudged.
But there are some nicely knowing 1980s touches – reminders of jingles to TV adverts long forgotten, a shop’s 5318008 alarm code that ‘spells BOOBIES backwards’ – and some stonking set-piece whole ensemble numbers, St Elmo’s Fire especially, that truly raise the roof.
With a dizzying whirlwind of ingenious set transformations, and an astonishing era-perfect attention to detail in the costume design (there can’t be a charity shop in the land with a shellsuit, scrap of spandex or stonewashed denim left) it’s a nostalgic jukebox journey of epic proportions.
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Hide AdTrippy and surreal it sometimes may be, it’s also quite the tour de force that elevates what could be just a frothy feel-good girls-night-out into a really quite ambitious piece of theatre. Now that’s what I call a musical.
- NOW That’s What I Call A Musical is at The Lyceum, Sheffield, until Saturday, September 14