THEATRE REVIEW: A musical with not a lot to Shout about

Feb 19 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

Sheila White, Claire Sweeney and Donna Steele in Shout! _320

Shout!, Liverpool Empire Theatre

MUSICALS often have feather-light plot-lines: Shout! is unusual in having a virtually non-existent one.

The new show – opening its British tour at the Empire last night – theoretically follows the adventures of three girls who move to London in the 1960s, a time when events were said to be Swinging.

These girls obviously went to the wrong place (Peckham) and get most of their thrills through the pages of a magazine named Shout.

Settling in to a hairdresser’s named Best Cuts, run by Aunt Yvonne, they remain there for most of the decade, each year signified by its appearance projected on the back of the single set.

They sit on chairs and swap girly talk with the occasional flash of humour (it is written by comedienne Jenny Eclair’s writing partner Julie Balloo) and more often stand up to sing some songs from the 1960s.

There is a vague attempt to match songs to plot but with so little plot, that proves a difficulty.

By the end of the first half, a girl announces she is pregnant while in the second, one naively falls for her gay theatre tutor and the threesome head off to Spain for a holiday where they win a talent contest.

And that’s about it.

What adventures they have they tend to talk about sitting down on chairs or (when things really get swinging) bean-bags.

The three actresses – Liverpool’s own Claire Sweeney as the sexy one, Donna Steele as the naive one and Shona White as the bespectacled mousy one – do have good singing voices and put lots of energy into the songs.

Louise Plowright, as the older woman, Yvonne, provides a few laughs although most of the comedy comes from the single man on stage Howard Jones who is the voice of Shout, a radio presenter, a Spanish waiter and several other characters.

All the performers deserve better than this pale excuse for a musical, although through sheer hard work they do finally get the audience to its collective feet for the song finale.

philkey@dailypost.co.uk