No need for Barry — his songs will do

CAN’T SMILE WITHOUT YOU, Palace, Manchester
ANYWAY, I’ve got this idea for a musical: I’m calling it “My Old Man’s a Dustman” and it’s based on all the hits of Lonnie Donegan. It’s quite short.

I was considering a Billy Joel musical, since there’s a lot more romance in his stuff, and that’s a bit easier than a show about dustmen. But no; Lonnie it is.

We had a lot of musical concert-biographies in the Nineties, but now we are discarding the composer and just grafting the music on to new shows.

The most stunning of these is “Mamma Mia”, of course, a sublime mix of sun, sea, sand and Abba, without any physical Abba.

In this one, Barry Manilow’s monumental ballads — “Mandy”, “One Voice”, “Could it be Magic” and lots more, as well as his uptempo stuff like “Copacabana”, are crowbarred into a story with no Manilow connection (though the main character’s name is Lowiman — geddit?).

I reckon the writers just laid all the lyrics out on paper, drew a line between all the place references, names and emotions they could find and cobbled together a musical that joined the lines. It’s the technique I’ll be using on Dustman.

“Can’t Smile” has Chesney Hawkes as the leader of an English band that auditions in America. He finds a fantastic girl, Mandy, then promptly goes back home, gets a head injury, and forgets her.

Cue the band’s rise to fame, an American tour, him remembering and finding her again. In between there are lots of locations from the songs (New England, New York, several places with names matching those in his songs, and Grimsby; I think that last one is ironic), and lots of songs with very little reason for being there, except they sort of fit.

The band’s four members play strongly; supporting male lead Edward Handoll and his opposite number, Francesca Jackson, get less stage time than they deserve and comedy producer Jeff (Howard Samuels) gets a little too much.

The action centres on singer Tony (Chesney Hawkes) and the girl of his injured dreams, Mandy (Siobhan Dillon — like Francesca, a Lloyd Webber reality TV finalist)

Hawkes can’t really act and has minimal stage presence, but sings the songs well and even sounds a little like Manilow. Dillon has a terrific voice and is beautiful in the role.

The whole, lighter-than-air confection is entertaining and gets by on a large dose of the Nasal One. The audience wouldn’t have it any other way.

But can Lonnie match up?

PG