All You Need Is Love

Pop compilations have long been a reliable musical theatre standby. But
they’ve been growing up lately: Mamma Mia! built an entirely new book around Abba’s songbook, and now All You Need is Love, drawing on Lennon and McCartney’s repertoire, is as much about its concept as it is about being a concert.

This is not the first time, but it is definitely the worst time, that a
conscious aesthetic of this kind has been applied to a revue in which its creators attempt to add its own interpretive layer to the material in question. But if a concept revue like Smokey Joe’s Cafe was in synch and sympathy with its Lieber and Stoller source material, this one -co-directed and co-devised by Jon Miller and Pete Brooks – is not only out of kilter with its frequently glorious McCartney/Lennon songs, but also seemingly out of tune and tempo with them, too.

With virtually every number heavily re-orchestrated, the songs are by turns rendered virtually unrecognisable, bizarre and even laughable, especially when the staging adds its own incongruities, like the suspended lamps on pedestals that are flown in or a giant chair that dominates the stage (and the show’s poster). Some of the orchestrations are downright bizarre: Yellow Submarine, for instance, is given a treatment that sounds like it’s being played on a fairground carousel, while From Me to You has the ambient quality you associate with a relaxation tape to accompany a new age therapy.

Not that there’s anything remotely relaxing or therapeutic about most of this busy show. Trawling through some 54 songs in just over 2 hours, it’s mostly an incoherent muddle. The first act made me feel like I’d wandered into an over-choreographed revival of the 1960s pastiche Grease; the second act, with some rockier riffs, sounds like early ’70s Lloyd Webber in his Jesus Christ Superstar mould. Rarely was I reminded of The Beatles.

As the talented cast of twelve wrestle with these directorial and musical choices, all the while engaged in the athletic but pointless choreography of Nigel Charnock and Kate Prince, the occasional moment breaks free of the deadening concept: even if Let it Be is reconceived as a soul gospel anthem, it is sold so electrifyingly by Linda John-Pierre that it brings the house down. But even more affecting, and effective, is Yesterday, delivered more or less straight by Jacquie Dubois, proving that these songs do not need a little help from friends like Miller, Brooks, and musical arranger and supervisor Keith Strachan, but are quite capable of being delivered the way they were written.

Two Edinburgh Festivals ago, and subsequently at the Lyric Hammersmith, a European troupe called Anonymous Society thrillingly revealed the great Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel in a new conceptualized light; but the spirit of invention and integrity of that is in dismally short supply here.

– by Mark Shenton