Saved by the music

Save The Last Dance For Me, Opera House, Manchester
TO enjoy this show fully you really need to have mellowed to a great age, so the loud music becomes good fun and the story that surrounds it you probably can’t hear unless you put a new battery in your hearing aid.

Bill Kenwright has been producing concert shows like this for years, and scored one of his biggest successes with “Dreamboats and Petticoats”, which started life as a CD compilation set and is now on its umpteenth year in theatres.

This second go at the same sort of procedure I fear won’t fare quite as well. It has the same production team and scriptwriters, TV sitcom guys Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, but fails to convince even slightly.

In the past I have always complained that Kenright’s shows such as “Buddy”, ”Elvis” and other similar efforts were just an excuse to wrap pop songs round a badly-written biography and have a sing-song in the second half.

I found myself thinking fond thoughts of those shows while watching the early-Sixties sisters (Megan Jones and Hannah Frederick) go on their hols for the first time. At Lowestoft they meet a couple of US airmen (Jason Denton and A J Dean) and the younger girl falls for black airman Curtis (Denton). Cue lines about race and scenes about tolerance.

The girls go home, young Marie pines for her lost love and he pines for her, and so on, until there’s a satisfactory conclusion that sadly doesn’t involve a B52 bomber from the base.

The story is pretty rough and weakly delivered on a cheap-looking set full of flat scenery, but the interesting thing is the music, by forgotten pop partnership Jerome Felder — known as Doc Pomus — and Mort Schuman.

Just before The Beatles, this pair wrote dozens of hits for bands on both sides of the Atlantic, from “Teenager in Love” to Elvis’s “Suspicion” and the likes of “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “This Magic Moment”, “Sweets for My Sweet” and “Viva Las Vegas”.

These and many more are delivered by the leads and a highly competent band, though the music reaches a peak on a lovely acapella rendering of “Sweets for My Sweet” in the first half.

Go for the music if you’re a fan of the composers and you won’t be disappointed, but otherwise you won’t miss much if you turn your hearing aid down during the dialogue to conserve power.