Mangled musical fails to warm up

All good clean fun: the cast of "Hot Stuff" - Paul Duckworth (the Boss) surrounded by Abigail Climer (back left), Lakesha Cammock (back right) and Nicola Hawkins (front).

HOT STUFF, Oldham Coliseum, to September 26

I WAS looking forward to seeing “Hot Stuff” again in its original home, 25 years on, but anticipation can lead to disappointment.

The musical’s co-writer and director Paul Kerryson — who at the time was the Coliseum’s artistic director — got the best singers he could find and turned one of the first successful jukebox musicals into a touring hit which had people cheering in the aisles.

This was partly due to Kerryson’s mastery of the musical form. He had the show grow out of broad comedy in the first half to reach an emotional plateau, then soar off into the stratosphere with the combination of the right song sequence and the right singers. These things don’t happen by accident.

Anniversary director and current Coliseum boss Kevin Shaw goes for an entirely different approach; one that concentrates pretty much on the comedy and almost lets the music take care of itself.

The song list seems a bit light, the singers decidedly so: indeed the evening runs about 20 minutes shorter than I recall.

I might have been happy with this if the script had been beefed up to make it really funny and the performers allowed to sell it effectively. But the script remains terrible, full of lame jokes and unfunny interjections.

The acting is thus immediately compromised — so much so that drag performer Alan French as Lucy Fur only warms up in the second half (and then not very much), and the Devil (Paul Duckworth), is saddled with awful dialogue and manages to mangle it accordingly.

This comic approach leaves little room for the emotion-building music to work any magic.

Abigail Climer, Nicola Hawkins and Ibinabo Jack have good but not outstanding voices, but the rest are pretty average.

The second half has the obligatory medley of pop hits but these fail to build to a much-needed climax.

What would otherwise have been the best-delivered song of the night, “Midnight Train to Georgia”, was spoiled by having the backing singers subtly play the fool.

And can it be right that the most entertaining numbers were sung by members of the band, who came front of stage from their podium at the back to do so?