Leeds Citizen went to see Save the Last Dance for Me at The Grand the other day (he knew all the songs, it was his era) …
Picture the scene: it’s 1963, mum and dad are saying goodbye to their two girls who are off on their summer holiday to the seaside at Lowestoft. No more working for a week or two …
You can tell it’s the early sixties because Dad’s called Cyril and looks just like Blakey from ‘70s hit comedy On the Buses, and Mum’s called Mildred and is a spit of Miriam Karlin in a headscarf. And there’s steam trains and Robertson’s Golden Shred (shhh!) on the breakfast table, and demure frocks and stylish slacks, and Mr Whippy ice-cream.
Off the girls go.
But, to quote the blurb, young love (yes, there’s love) and holiday romance is never as simple as it sounds, and the sisters soon realise that while the world around them is still watching itself in black and white, life and love can be much more colourful.
Exactly.
Especially when there’s GIs from the nearby US air-force base to go to endless hops with, fall in love with, have hilarious misunderstandings with (“bum?” “bum” “oh, bum!” “yeah, bum” “you yanks!” “you limeys!”), and get heartbroken over (“it’ll never work, we’re too different”).
Anyway, enough of the plot, which, in the best tradition of the great UK ‘60s pop musical (It’s Trad Dad, Help … there must be another one …), is just a series of random pegs on which to hang some cracking songs that take you … erm … on a feel-good journey back to music’s golden era:
(plot) It’s raining in Lowestoft (cue song) Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain. (plot) 17-year-old sister Marie swoons over GI (song) Why must I be a teenager in love. (plot) Girls ask each other what happened on a date (song) Then he kissed me. (plot) Marie waits anxiously for letter from GI (song) Please, Mr Postman …
You get the picture? (We see)
And why not?
So the accomplished cast rattle their way through nearly 30 numbers, many of them penned by Brill Building songsmiths Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. And they carry it off well, sticking to the original arrangements, avoiding the X-Factor vocal tremolo and nailing (not easy) the groove of their grandparents’ generation.
In fact they’re so good I’ve already forgotten the little flourish of mid-eighties synth strings that snuck in to ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’. Oh, and ‘Green Onions’, which … well … don’t try it, kids, unless you’re sure that pre-set on the keyboard marked Hammond does what it says on the display.
The acting – there wasn’t room for a lot – was fine too. We all giggled away at the funny bits (script by ‘Birds of a Feather’ creators Marks and Gran), delivered mostly by worldly wise elder sister Jennifer (who’d been “all the way”) and her Brummie beau Carlo (who wasn’t allowed to call his cornets Mr Whippoi).
Brits (the actors/musicians are all Brits) playing Americans singing American songs in a British musical? It felt just right, especially for those of us who were teenagers in the sixties. We grew up on transatlantic ersatz. Till The Beatles our musical world was total ersatz.
Fair play to the cast for their energy. When they were singing they were pretty much always dancing – the sort of generic “sixties dancing” that we’ve loved down the decades as performed by BBC light entertainment hoofers on a Saturday evening.
So why was I a bit disappointed that they didn’t do the Twist, the Frug, the Watusi, the Hitch-hike, the Gravedigger or any of those other crazes in the same shambolic way we did them in St Chad’s parish hall in Headingley in 1963? It’s a show. I should get over it. But …
In any case, I’m not sure you’re allowed to review a jukebox musical without saying ‘the real stars of the show are the songs’. Guess what? The real stars of the show are the songs – the ones by Pomus and Shuman and other old favourites chucked into the pot (‘Be My Baby’, ‘Then He Kissed Me’). We were up for a proper singalong – most of us knew most of the words, I reckon – but somehow it never really happened.
Best of all, though, was when they sang ‘Tell Her’. I felt a deep longing well up inside me. I used to keep a picture of Billie Davis in my school blazer breast pocket. I’d cut it out of Record Mirror when she was in the charts in 1963 with her version of the song. When I got back home I found her on YouTube and played it. I still love her.