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Show: Greatest Days – the official Take That musical
Society: New Victoria Theatre (professional productions)
Venue: New Victoria theatre. The Ambassadors, The Peacocks Centre, Woking, Surrey GU21 6GQ
Credits: By Tim Firth. Music and lyrics by Take That. Produced by Adan Kenwright for Kindred Partners.
Type: Sardines
Author: Paul Johnson
Performance Date: 05/06/2023
Greatest Days – the official Take That musical
Paul Johnson | 06 Jun 2023 12:01pm
The cast of GREATEST DAYS. Photo: Alastair Muir
Five short years after I first reviewed David Pugh’s original production (‘short years’ is right too… how does time appear to speed up in ‘theatre’?) at New Wimbledon Theatre the show is back again but this time at a different ATG venue – Woking’s New Victoria Theatre as the new tour stops on its whitle-stop trip around the UK & Ireland. Still written by Gary Barlow’s local chum, Tim Firth, the show now has a new title and has been reworked for audiences. Speaking of ‘audiences’ its very interesting to imagine what Woking’s auditorium would have looked like twenty-five years ago as it was bursting with TT fans of a certain age on press night – ladies in their forties and fifties. Some of them had even enthusuastically dragged their husbands along. (goodness knows how they sold it to them).
The stroke of genius that Tim Firth has injected into the show is mirroring the audience onstage. Coronation Street star (or Hear’Say star depending on your age), Kym Marsh opens the show as Rachel just before a flash-back of twenty-five years takes place to when she was sixteen-years-old. Cue Marsh’s actual daughter, Emilie Cunliffe, who portrays Rachel’s younger self (another publicity masterstroke). Rachel and her four young best friends are besotted by a boyband who are never named (although we have aleady been assured that it is not Take That) and one of the girls, Debbie (Mary Moore), wins tickets for the firve to see them in concert. Debbie soon is killed in a car accident.
The whole flashback is triggered because older Rachel (Marsh) has just repeated the feat by winning four tickets to see the boyband again (who remarkably do not have appeared to have aged a single day, twenty-five years later). I can understand the passing of time has effected the fans but time cannot stand still for the ‘boys in the band… they will all be twenty-five years older too, surely? So , presumably the ‘new’ gig in Athens that older Rachel has won the tickets to is a kind of reunion concert. Either way it is the girls’ ‘memories’ of the boyband that live on. Throughought the evening the boyband purb out eighteen hits of Take That including: Relight my Fire, Could it Be Magic?, Never Forget. A Million Love Songs, The Flood (new?) and Rule the World… plus many more.
The songs, backed by MD Zach Flis’s five-piece orchestra/musicians/band, are all sung by the cast and certainly keep the female deligation in the audience happy. The whole thing reminds me of when I saw The Osmonds recently – except, onstage, that show was a pure biopic – but the screaming ladies in the audience were just as feverish as they were last night.
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LtoR: Hannah Brown, Mary Moore, Emilie Cunliffe, Kitty Harris, Mari McGinlay in GREATEST DAYS. Photo: Alastair Muir
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New Victoria Theatre auditorium
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LtoR: Regan Gascoigne, Archie Durrant, Jamie Corner, Kalifa Burto, Alexanda O'Reilly in GREATEST DAYS. Photo: Alastair Muir