Seventies teen mag bursts on to stage

Photo: Pamela Raith Photography

Dancing, Seventies style in jackie, The Musical. Picture

Jackie The Musical

Manchester Opera House

ON THE surface this is just another of those cash-in, pop-packed, story-lite shows designed to take your money in return for a few songs.

But no: the musical based on the “next best thing for girls, after boys” – Seventies teen agony and romance magazine Jackie – is made of more.

Actually, any show that can get most of a (mainly female) audience singing along from the third tune of the overture onwards has to have something going for it.
Even the middle-aged guy behind me was having a whale of a time, but since he had a stiff leg and was wearing a sling, I assumed he was on strong medication...

The “something going for it” in this case is a believable story about Jackie, a fifty-something, about-to-divorce mum (Janet Dibley) who tries to move on until she finds her nice new guy is married and as screwed up as she is.

It’s all handled very lightly and includes a few broad characters for good measure, such as cafe owner Frankie (Bob Harms), a great, over-the-top singer and dancer, and Jackie’s pal Jill (Lory Haley Fox) the unwitting subject of a mad crush by Jackie’s 19-year-old son David (Michael Hamway).

If you are getting the idea that the story could have come from the convoluted romantic triangles of pages of the teenage D C Thomson mag, you wouldn’t be far wrong – especially when one of the main characters is Jackie’s younger self (Daisy Steere), who swears by every word the mag’s agony aunts, Cathy and Claire, write.

The main fun element of the evening is the songs, beautifully played and sung throughout.

The audience starts early and sings whenever it gets a chance to hits from David Cassidy, the Osmonds, T-Rex, Jimmy Ruffin and many more, the best part of which being that they are carefully integrated into the storyline and move the show along – much like Abba’s tunes do for Mamma Mia.

There’s a particularly good rendition of the Everlys’ “Love Hurts”, for instance, and to be historically accurate we’ll assume the producers reference the Seventies recording (by Nazareth), rather than the 1960 original.

I sneaked a peek or two at my sister’s copies back in the Seventies, but if I’d known all this was going on in there, I might have got a subscription of my own...