Red Bus Londinium Life

Initially launched to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the ubiquitous NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation tapes, NOW That’s What I Call A Musical is a piece of fun and cheesy nostalgia.

Set simultaneously in Birmingham in 1989 and 2009, this is unashamedly a juke box musical. The plot is fairly flimsy and relies heavily on the musical numbers driving it forward but the audience are not here for the plot so much as a dance back through the music of their youth: “Video Killed The Radio Star”, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”,  “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves” and more. All the musical numbers are strong and it is a delight to hear them live.

The plot uses a harried Nina Wadia (Gemma) at a 2009 school reunion as a vehicle to bring people together with flashbacks to 1989 where we meet Younger April (Maia Hawkins) and younger Gemma (Nikita Johal). The frequent changes between the two timelines is initially a little jarring but soon settles down.

Younger Gemma and Younger April are full of the naïveté of youth – big dreams (a nurse, a movie star) and an utterly unshakeable faith that they will always be best friends. 2009 sees only some of this has come to pass: broken dreams and a failure to reach out to each other. There are attempts at deeper story lines – suicide and domestic abuse – but these are not perhaps given the care they deserve and maybe the show might have worked better without them.

Director and choreographer Craig Revel Horwood is a household name as the most demanding judge on Strictly Come Dancing, so I was a little disappointed with the choreography. I suspect this was a stylistic choice – we were meant to be at a very average high school reunion in Birmingham, so no-one would be leaping around like Trinity Laban graduates, but it still could have perhaps been a little more ambitious.

The biggest strength was the family relationships in Younger Gemma’s family with Christopher Glover, Luke Latchman, Poppy Tierney, Nikita Johal capturing the rough, tumble and teasing of family life perfectly. The two Tims (Chris Grahamson and Kieran Cooper) are also accurately and oozingly awful.

NOW That’s What I Call A Musical is an enjoyable evening of musical nostalgia and a nod to times gone by which will leave audiences who grew up with the NOW tapes very satisfied.

[Thank you to New Wimbledon theatre for the gifted tickets for an honest review].