Lost hopes of the 60s

THE cast of new musical All or Nothing, Manchester Opera House to Saturday

ALL OR NOTHING

Opera House, Manchester

SMALL Faces burned reasonably bright for not very long, and had fewer than a handful of hits between 1965-1969. So why the biographical musical at all?

Weeelll, because someone thought it would be a good idea to make a show about a London-based band and The Kinks were already taken, I suppose.

Also because, unlike The Beatles, or the very shrewd business brain that drove the Stones, Small Faces were led by Steve Marriott (played young by ebullient Tim Edwards, older and boozily in narration by Chris Simmons), who if this show is to be believed was a vain teenage bully who continually made extremely bad choices for the rest of the band.

The recent Kinks musical was generally marked down for having a lot of plot and not much music and you could almost suggest this one is the opposite; too many songs - quite a lot of them by other people such as Sonny and Cher and Dusty Springfield - but not much detail.

The show moves swiftly through Marriott's fall from good teenage actor to middling musician, the collection of Ronnie Lane (Joshua Dowen), Kenney Jones (Drew-Levi Huntsman) and Jim Winston (Joseph Peters) to form the first band, the dropping of Winston in favour of Ian McLagen (Josh Madison), acquiring hard-nosed manager Don Arden, and eventually dropping him in favour of Andrew Loog Oldham, neither of whom paid them very much.

Along the way they recorded the title track, Tin Soldier, Itchycoo Park and a small number of others, some hits, some not, and albums that sometimes hit the mark, often didn't.

I'll be honest and say I never really liked them much; where fellow RnB band the Stones had extraordinary stage presence and The Beatles were pushing ahead with new kinds of pop, the Smalls tried to keep a purer RnB sound that was no longer very fashionable. At best you could say they kept it fairly real, man, but were wasting their time.

As a show this one zips quite quickly but is plagued more than usual by hammed-up secondary performances and unnecessary humour. The band is loud and good and the set a chaotic mix of lighting bars and artwork from the sixties.

Ultimately the Smalls burst apart in a fit of pills, booze and lost hopes; so much so that even the sing-song at the end comes after a particularly downbeat end to the tale.