Bad Girls - the Musical

Published Friday 14 September 2007 at 11:45 by Mark Shenton

The logo for Bad Girls - the Musical features a giant glitter ball that’s been shackled up, but there’s no restraining the pleasures of the alternately gritty and witty show it is promoting.

While London theatres are saturated by Broadway imports and jukebox shows, this is a sadly rare but delightful thing - an original new British musical by a first-time West End composer Kath Gotts, with a book by the original creators of the long-running (but now concluded) TV show it is based on, Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus.

The result is in the vibrant tradition of shows like Blood Brothers, Spend Spend Spend and Billy Elliot, anchoring a story that embraces strong social issues with punchy songs to effortlessly provide the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine - or in this case, the prison gruel - go down.

Ingeniously melding the harsh realities of its women’s prison setting with the irresistible bounce of a musical whose primary objective is to entertain, Maggie Norris’s production steers a tight-rope balance between concern and camp that allows us to invest in the characters as well as laugh at and with them.

A two-act musical may not be able to build the same kind of narrative sweep and characterisation that was achieved over eight TV series, but thanks to clever designs by Colin Richmond (with atmosphere sound and video by Mic Pool), we are immediately transported to G-wing and the characters and hierarchies between them is quickly established.

That’s greatly aided by Gotts’ appealing pop melodies that provide instant shortcuts to making emotional connections between them. The cast includes veterans of the TV show like Helen Fraser, reprising her tough-as-old-boots turn as officer Sylvia Hollamby and Maria Charles as dotty OAP lifer Noreen Biggs, plus newcomers to the line-up like sassy Sally Dexter as new inmate Yvonne Atkins who stirs up the old guard.

They’re a bunch of jailbirds I happily enjoyed doing time with.