Love Shack

Published Thursday 17 March 2005 at 10:10 by Natalie Anglesey

The world premiere of Love Shack, a new musical, appears to contain all the right ingredients for success. There’s a compilation of 35 hit numbers, plus a pretty new song composed by Gary Barlow, all performed by a predominately young, attractive cast.

Written by Daniel Peak, best known for television sitcoms, it desperately needs a workable structure for the songs. What we have is Friends meets Men Behaving Badly with pop music.

Jon Lee from S Club, is pleasant enough as Sam, engaged to Joanne (Natalie O’Donnell). Best friends are clothes-obsessed Bonnie (Faye Tozer from Steps) and Will (Noel Sullivan from Hear’Say) who shows good comic potential.

Kim Gavin conceived, directed and choreographed this work and it is to his credit that there is the nub of a decent enough show in there. However, it needs work to iron out the obvious wrinkles. The sketches are short but not all that sweet or funny and the cast waits for applause and laughs that don’t come readily. The role of the narrator only distances the cast from the audience of teenyboppers who wanted more, not less, of their favourites.

The band is good and Neal Wright as the singing postman deserves a couple of solo spots as he has the best voice on stage. In three months time this will be a completely different show but at present unfortunately, it is still a work in progress.