Love - The Musical

Published Thursday 5 June 2008 at 14:10 by Catherine Gerbrands

As the audience find their seats, an elderly choir in dressing gowns run through renditions of old standards, while a perfectly coiffed nurse attempts to conduct with less than encouraging words.

A contemporary musical set in a care home may not sound like the most appealing of dramatic choices, but this is a tender and comic look at the surprises life can hold, even when coping with the slowly degenerating brains of our senior years.

The disciplinarian yet kindly pantomime nurse, played by Hatla Williams, could be a collective fantasy of the male residents. Once a presenter for the Icelandic version of X Factor, she sufficiently amateurises her voice for the role. Margaret (Anna Calder Marshall) and Neville (Julian Curry) as her mischievous lover lead a supporting cast comprising largely of local community choir members, many of them relative newcomers to the stage, who nevertheless stood up comfortably next to their professional colleagues.

I would have liked to have seen a few musical forays sacrificed in order to hear others in their entirety and one of the more eye-misting moments was a solo rendition of the Drugs Don’t Work by a resident (Dudley Sutton) straining to be heard through his chemical straightjacket. The disturbing afterthought is that in all actuality, I will be singing Kaiser Chiefs and Bowie songs with my friends in a similar place when I start losing my faculties.

This quirky and enjoyable production is the second this year for the Lyric from Vesturport Theatre to be adapted by David Farr.