Review: The Band (Manchester Opera House)
If someone had said, 25 years ago, that we'd be waving our telephones around to make twinkly lights in the dark they'd have been strapped to a stool and dunked in a river. But a lot can happen in 25 years. We change shape, we find things and lose more, and in amongst the debris we manage somehow to love and to dance around the living room, finding our lives mirrored by perfectly-timed soundtracks created by the likes of Take That.
There's nothing much more to this jukebox musical, co-produced by Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and Robbie Williams, than you'd expect from such a well-trodden genre, other than being able to marvel at the remarkable capacity Take That had to knock out some of the most honeyed, heart-breaking, uplifting tunes of the pop era. Their, frankly, classical quality and sheer exuberance manages to transport a pretty pedestrian tale to a sweet spot.
It's 1993 and The Band – or 'the boys' – are the crushes of five school friends desperate to meet their heroes. Fast forward 25 years and the girls – minus one of them has gone to the big party in the sky – reunite for the first time at a gig in Prague (the boys haven't aged one bit!). Cue some syrupy poppycock leading to the inevitable reheated conclusion that we should look forward and embrace who we've become and not look back and be friends forever and be happy despite what the world throws at us… Or is it the other way round? No matter. You get the picture.
The ever-present 'boys' keep us from too much maudlin introspection, however. Like the ghosts of X Factor winners past they're everywhere: popping out of school lockers, morphing into statues on a fountain, sitting around the breakfast table. They are, the programme informs me, Five to Five, a group who won a TV competition to be here. They're lovely and can hold a (Take That) tune, but they're not a patch on the real thing, and this is where The Band can frustrate: it's touch and go whether you'd rather be at home listening to Take That and party at full blast; at an actual real-life gig; or sat in a theatre watching the ersatz version wind their way around a bit of a threadbare plot. The saving grace is that Barlow is such an exquisite songwriter even Bob the Builder could tackle his anthems and they'd still be perfect.
The (all-male) creative team make a good fist of telling the girls' story with some nifty lines from Tim Firth (Calendar Girls) to keep us amused, while the cast who play the young and older versions of the besotted fans capture the essence of teen- and middle-age beautifully.
If you can get past the hackneyed plot and the sporadic tracts of faintly screechy chit chat, feel free to grab the tunes by the horns and have a blast. I'll be 50 next year. For a while last night, I felt 25 again.
The Band runs at Manchester Opera House until 30 September, before touring across the UK in 2018.
