So bad, it’s good...

BAD GIRLS, Playhouse 2, Shaw

IT’S the sort of musical that might have Rodgers and Hammerstein turning in their graves; a show rife with lesbian romance, intimidating women, criminal warders, wrongful imprisonment, drugs, alcohol, honey-trapping and a touch of arson.

In short, Congress Players’ latest production — one of two this year, this one in Shaw because the Coliseum is unavailable — is a musical as outrageously far-flung as the ridiculous girls-banged-up (in jail) TV drama on which it is based.

The TV show of the same name ran for eight series and over 100 episodes, though goodness knows how. This musical, first seen in 2006 at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, hoped to cash in on the fan-following of the TV escapades of Larkhill Prison, but didn’t quite manage it.

Why? Well on TV the attraction was clear. The show was mad, overblown melodrama. On stage, quite apart from the show being — well, not very good (albeit rather enjoyably not very good), it doesn’t quite know whether it is comedy or drama and doesn’t develop its characters to the point where we care much about any of them.

It also has the evil warders so unpleasant they might as well have waxed moustaches — yes, even the women. And ultimately it isn’t helped by songs which veer, madly, from a sort of fantasy Astaire and Rogers shuffle (with fantasy dance sequence to match) by the warders, to blues and musical comedy numbers.

Having said all that, Bad Girls is ridiculously enjoyable. What it loses in, well, almost everything, it makes up for in unashamed daftness, with mad plot turns and the most lax attitude to prison discipline this side of the nearest boarding school.

A good band and simple but effective set and lighting set things up for a large cast to do their worst, if you’ll pardon the expression, from the mouthy nastiness of queen bee Shell (Tori Green) and her sidekick Denny (Justine Moore) to the do-gooding softness of wing governor Helen (Laura Meredith Hoyle) and the exact opposite from Machiavellian hard-line warders Fenner and Hollamby (John Whitehead and Elaine Thompson).

Stand-outs among the prisoners are mobster’s wife Yvonne (Joanne Gill) and the two Julies, (Samantha Bates and Nicola Mead), though there isn’t really a weak link. The evening is quick-moving and the ensemble singing quite impressive, though director John Wood does tend to let the jokes pass by too fleetingly.

But overall that’s prison girls for you: they’re so bad, it’s good.

PG


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