Tuesday nights at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand are usually taken up by concerts and gigs. It’s the ‘dark’ day for Back to the Future the Musical, which has eight performances a week, a Monday matinee, two shows on Wednesday, evening shows on Thursday and Friday, two shows on Saturday and a Sunday matinee). Most of them are passable, sufficiently entertaining. Very few are of the calibre of ShowPlanr’s Defying Gravity: West End Women, which in my estimation even surpassed Concerts by Candlelight’s Meat Loaf by Candlelight in terms of stage presence, audience engagement and production quality.
With a show called Defying Gravity, however, the show pulls in a certain kind of fan of a certain show. There are some fans of the musical Wicked who are perfectly reasonable. And then there are ones that aren’t. The advantages of my front row vantage point were somewhat marred by fans of Wicked (who gave the title track of this concert a standing ovation, obviously) going in and out, without ever saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ as the rest of us stood yet again to let them through. The ladies on stage, tellingly, had little to say about the Wicked fanbase, beyond thanking them for buying tickets, though they spoke very warmly about fellow cast members, past and present, and people in the production team. At the end, as we were filing out, a Wicked fan took it upon herself to repeatedly ram into me, as though that would somehow miraculously make hundreds of people disappear into thin air, clearing the way for her and her chums. Revenge is a dish best served chilled, and as she queued for the conveniences, being a bloke, I made a beeline for the gents, and was on my way out while she was still queued.
Anyway, the visuals in this show, consisting of a range of still and moving projected images, were helpful to a point, in displaying the title of whatever musical a song being sung was taken from. The faces on screen, however, were weird or otherwise laughable – until the penny dropped and I realised they were AI images. The real deal, in the form of an on-stage four-piece band led by Ellie Verkerk, and the four singers – Maggie Lynne, Michelle Pentecost, Tasha Sheridan and Jodie Nolan – were palpably enjoying themselves on stage, taking the audience through a very broad range of musical styles, eras and tempos, from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel to Marlow and Moss’ Six.
By default, then, there was something for ‘everyone’, apart from, I suppose, people who dislike musicals generally. It is to the producers’ credit that the cast were able to speak freely about the challenges of working in the live entertainment industry whilst raising dependent children, with shoutouts to babysitters and childminders. Ellie Verkerk even talked about a producer who, some twenty years ago, had told her that he was more important than her children. Cue a collective audible gasp moment at the man child with whom Verkerk has nothing to do with these days.
You need not be a hardcore musical theatre fan to recognise many of the showtunes. They weren’t trying to be overly clever and sophisticated by throwing in some deliberately obscure songs from shows that didn’t last long – nothing, then, from Opening Night, Viva Forever! or Imagine This. There were probably two shows, out of approximately thirty featured (yeah, it was a long evening) that I haven’t seen – Mean Girls and Company. (My thanks to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, who staged a student production of A Little Night Music at Edinburgh Fringe 2024.) Much familiarity, then – or perhaps not for the hardcore Wicked fans who don’t see anything else. There were one or two harmonies and mashups that didn’t quite work. (What was that ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ / ‘On My Own’ mashup from Les Misérables all about?) And hearing 'He's My Boy' from Everybody's Talking About Jamie being sung in something approaching Received Pronunciation just sounded so wrong.
By and large, however – and I wasn’t there to review, even though I’ve just gone and bloody done just that anyway – this was a splendid evening. Whoever directed them (Charlotte Leighton, the producer, has an introductory note in the programme, but there’s no indication of a designated director) has done well to rein these leading ladies in. Too often at musical theatre concerts, performances can be too hammy, with people hitting the biggest of big notes as though there was prize money available for being excessively loud. Not here – this was refined, controlled singing – and very enjoyable. I’d see it all again.
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