Not singing from the same songsheet

Satin ’n’ Steel, Oldham Coliseum

THERE are enjoyable things and some rather less enticing things about this production of Amanda Whittington’s musical play.

This Star is Born for club-singers gives us Teena, a cake factory packer in her 20s, a strong singer and pretty, but naive and lacking confidence; and Vince, a 40-something club singer, past his best but still looking for his break.

In Teena. the girl who doesn’t even win the karaoke session he is hosting, Vince sees potential and grabs it, getting far more than he bargained for.

The show takes us onstage and backstage, to Satin ’n’ Steel’s performances and their private lives behind the scenes.

They move up to slightly better gigs each year but there is friction between their professional and private life.

Teena has fallen for her Svengali but he, weak, duplicitous and — wildly unnecessarily — bisexual (we think), hasn’t really fallen for her.

First problem is the period: the story is set between 2004 and the present, but would be much more appropriately set 20 or even 25 years ago, when there still was a club scene in which singing duos like this one could aspire to a comfortable living and degree of fame.

And while we enjoy the music and the funny lines — and make no mistake, there’s plenty of both — that is pretty much all there is. If a few laughs and The Wind Beneath My Wings are all you go for, you won’t be disappointed.

Former Emmerdale stars Roxanne Pallett and Matt Healy sing well and know how to deliver a laugh, and are well served by MD Howard Gray’s club-style arrangements and Nancy Surman’s low-rent sets.

There is much more to the play than that, but the complex dynamic of the duo, latent in the script, is rarely revealed in Joyce Branagh’s rather superficial production.

Roxanne Pallett is rather good, suggesting the naive qualities of the girl at the start, growing in confidence as the evening moves on and finally coming back to earth with a thud.

But for some reason Matt Healy seems to be channelling a mixture of Jack Duckworth and Vic Reeves, all cheeky grimaces and funny looks, offhand quips and strained apologies.

There are inklings of empathy in touching scenes in which she reveals her love for him, but there seems to be very little chemistry at other times. It’s as if she’s in a light drama and he’s in a comedy, and the result is wildly unbalanced