Review

Feelgood musical that could become a cult classic - Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, Apollo, review

Jamie
Josi Walker (Margaret New) John McCrea (Jamie New) and Mina Anwar (Ray Begum) Credit: Alastair Muir

Is Everybody’s Talking About Jamie the new Billy Elliot for our times? That’s what its producer Nica Burns would have us believe, having picked up the show after a mere three week run at Sheffield Crucible in February this year before sling-shotting it into the West End faster than it takes most musicals to say experimental workshop.

It tells the story of Jamie New (John McCrea: sharp, sassy, and delightfully out there and vulnerable), a gay teenager at a northern comprehensive, who, platinum-blond cropped hair shining like a beacon, decides to make his name as a transvestite and disrupt the system by turning up at his school “prom” wearing a frock. His friends love it, his enemies scorn him, and his dinosaur-like dad just doesn’t have a clue what to say, except good riddance.

It’s another classic Brit tale (see Brassed Off, The Full Monty, Little Voice) of an outsider who rocks the system in a hide-bound provincial town and, against all prejudice, wins over right-thinking people. What’s more, it’s anchored in real life. In 2011, a young lad from County Durham, Jamie Campbell, engaged a reality TV company to film him dressing up in drag for his school leaver’s ball and caused a sensation. Translating Jamie’s story to Sheffield, the director Jonathan Butterell, hand-in-hand with Dan Gillespie Sells (music) and Tom Macrae (book and lyrics), have created a show that might well, to judge by the audience’s rapt response, become a cult classic.

Jamie
Credit: Alastair Muir

Kate Prince’s choreography is sharp and cleverly evocative of both the trudging boredom of the classroom and the opportunities it gives for naughty self expression. The music, referencing pop, funk, northern soul, Abba, Elton John, Radiohead (not to mention a deep undertow of the choppy guitar rhythms of Pink Floyd’s dystopian The Wall) is catchy, though a little bit middle-aged, and could soon be rendered rather old hat by arrival of the hip-hop gymnastics of Hamilton in London.

I didn’t leave the theatre with one tune, ear-worm-like, boring a hole in my ear, but there was the gorgeous honeyed voice of Lucie Shorthouse as Jamie’s Muslim best friend Pritti Pasha (the musical star of the show), and the blow-your-socks-off power of Josie Walker as Jamie’s mother (a bit mawkish for my taste, though my 78-year-old ma who accompanied me said Walker’s Big Kahuna number “My Boy”, about a mother’s unconditional love for her spawn, hit the sentimental bull’s-eye dead centre).

McCrea doesn’t have quite the showstopping voice you’d hope for in the lead, but he has bags of charisma, and only the most stony of hearted would fail to wish his character the happy – if somewhat confectedly feel-good – conclusion that he’s given.

 

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