The Stage

Never Forget

Published Friday 24 August 2007 at 14:35 by Mark Shenton

Top of the Pops may be no more, but with the first night crowd at Manchester Opera House weirdly being turned into a giant studio audience for the filming of the entire show, this was a retro night in more ways than one.

If, however, the all-pervasive cameras (and a bright purple glow thrown over the audience to light us, too, completely blew the effectiveness of James Whiteside’s stage lighting) were there to bring some kind of immortality to Never Forget, I was trying to erase it from my memory even as it unfolded.

Ed Curtis’s witless, pointless and largely joyless production may have been intended as a homecoming, of sorts, to a group that was actually launched in this city in 1990 and went on to become the most successful local British boy band since the Beatles.

But though they officially disbanded in 1996, they re-formed last year, minus Robbie Williams, thus mitigating the need for fans to get a compensatory nostalgic fix with this contrived story about the formation of a tribute band to their idols; and in any case, the ads at the back of The Stage are full of tribute bands and Robbie look-a-likes already, so do we really need a musical to follow the trials and tribulations of the formation of another? (And if we do, the 1999 show Boyband got there first in any case - and should have been a lesson learnt, as it died a fast death at the Gielgud).

Though pop Svengali Nigel Martin-Smith, Take That’s original creator, was in evidence on the first night, the band themselves have allegedly been trying to suppress this musicalisation - Gary Barlow, composer or co-writer of the 10 of the 13 songs heard in it, has said it has “the smell of the end of the pier about it”. But that’s both being too kind to the muddled mess on stage and is an insult to what actually plays at the end of piers.

At least they only aim for honest entertainment; this show, by contrast, tries to expose the cynical opportunism of the pop business while being a living embodiment of precisely the same kind of theatrical opportunism that jumps onto the Mamma Mia! bandwagon to try to re-ignite the fire of Take That’s appeal to harness its own. But even as the stage literally catches fire during ‘Relight My Fire’, it extinguishes hope for the jukebox musical’s continuing viability.

“Tribute bands is big business”, says Teddy Kempner’s manager optimistically (if grammatically incorrectly); but even if this show harnesses a youthfully energetic cast to prove it, including goofy Rupert Everett-lookalike Craig Els as Jake (playing Robbie in the band) and an appealing Dean Chisnall as Ash (or Gary Barlow), this show is unlikely to be.

It is only in the inevitable, now-obligatory megamix finale that they and the show are finally able to deliver the all-singing, all-dancing, extravaganza that the audience want to join in on and do, released at last from the purgatory of what’s gone before.

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