Great music, shame about the show

CARNABY STREET, THE MUSICAL”

Opera House, Manchester, to Saturday

YOU want them to be good and do well but you know when someone says they have put 16 years into a project and it’s a pop musical, it’s clear they might just be kidding themselves. Even “Les Miserables” took only a few months...

Which brings us to Carl Leighton-Pope, a veteran producer who has worked on some pretty respectable shows in his time.

Here he has written and produced a show he suggests is partly autobiographical and includes characters from his past as a Sixties teen, growing up in the capital, shopping in the centre of swinging London and popping down to Brighton on his Vespa at weekends for a spot of mayhem.

Not that there is any mayhem in the show: if this was a sort of B-Grade “Quadrophenia” (ask your dad), it might be more interesting.

But instead it’s a story that could have been outlined on the back of a fag packet in half an hour: pals go to London, join a band, get famous, get in trouble and sort themselves out in the end.

The real work — years, presumably — has clearly involved sitting down with the Big Book of Sixties Song Lyrics and finding suitable songs to fill in or advance the story, such as it is, rather than leaving us with another jukebox musical of greatest hits.

Then again, what hits! A catalogue of top tunes from Dusty, Cilla, Manfred Mann, Spencer Davis, the Moody Blues and many more. It’s worth the ticket price just to hear them again; it’s just a shame that the show around them isn’t up to much.

Yes, it has nice sets, great sound, a reasonable band and typically cheesy Sixties choreography that wouldn’t have disgraced the Young Generation.

Performances are okay, within the confines of not being anything more than ciphers, but the whole show has an odd, not-quite-there look about it that perhaps suggests veteran director Bob Tomson was finding it hard to find anything much for the cast to do.

When a pop song is being directed out to the audience, it’s tough to keep the peripheral actors interesting but not distracting — especially when there are so many songs to work through.

So by all means go for the music; you will enjoy yourself — but don’t expect to come out keen to go again.