Streets ahead this time around

CORRIE!, Palace, Manchester
CORRIE! embarks on its third week — or should that be episode — in Manchester and this time the Palace theatre was pretty full for the return local leg of a national tour.

Quite a bit has changed since the show played for two weeks at the Lowry last August.

It now has six cast members rather than five — only two of whom were there before; and there is a major scene about the epic explosion and tram crash of last Christmas — missing last time because it hadn’t yet happened.

And there are other edits and changes throughout the fast-moving evening: a lot of the heavenly choir stuff from Ena, Minnie and Martha as they looked down from on high — or at least from the Corrie rooftops — on the world below has been removed or rewritten, probably because it was pretty dull.

And moody glimpses of a poetic Elsie Tanner have been reduced, because whenever she was on the show slowed to a crawl.

Which is a roundabout way of saying playwright and Corrie scriptwriter Jonathan Harvey’s plundering of the archives (7,300 half-hours and counting) is now a tighter, faster-moving enterprise than it was.

He has also put in a little new material to visit some of the many major cast members he previously ignored. A lot of the improvement is also down to the hard-working cast.

The six — returnees Simon Chadwick and Leanne Best, both great — are matched by Daniel Crowder, Jo Mousley (a wonderful Hilda), Peter Temple and Lucy Thackeray, though the show suffers from being unamplified in a theatre this size: narrator Sherrie Hewson was often hard to hear.

The show is now more of a pantomime than before, what with many of the older female characters played by men rather than women, and the emphasis is most definitely on comedy. Every incident is given a sheen, or sometimes three coats, of comedy to kill its original depth and meaning and turn it to humour.

Pretty much only one truly lovely scene is allowed to remain; Hilda’s return home after Stan’s death, with his parcel of belongings. No laughs there, and none attempted. Everything else is fair game, and lots of fun.

Readers’ poll: who is Corrie’s greatest character? Hilda Ogden, no question.