WHY does this romanticised telling of the short, highly successful life of American rock’n’roll legend Buddy Holly – it only lasted around three years before he was tragedy killed aged 22 in and air crash – conjure up images of TV’s The Good Old Days from the City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds?
The answer lies in the climactic scene of this, one of the best juke box musicals, when in the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, A J Jenks’ Buddy Holly, Joshua Barton’s Big Bopper and Miguel Angel’s Richie Valens all call on the audience for the same sort of reaction that Marie Lloyd, George Laybourne, Sir Harry Lauder and the other music hall greats had with their audiences.
The date may have been the 1950s, but to lift the excitement and joy in the music, rock’n’roll and old time music hall, both needed that contact and response from an audience to make them take off.
As one classic number (Heartbeat, Chantilly Lace, La Bamba, Raining in My Heart, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore …) followed another, A J Jenks, Joshua Barton, Miguel Angel and the seven musician-singers who gathered on stage built up the excitement and milked the audience with the same sort of vigour and determination that Jon Monie and the cast at Theatre Royal have been doing so successfully over the Christmas season in The Further Adventures of Peter Pan.
And the audience responded as commanded, requiring no extra encouragement at the end rising unsolicited to demand encores, reluctant to see the cast of Matt Salisbury’s slick, speedy production leave the stage and discussing where and when they had first heard That’ll be the Day, Peggy Sue, Oh Boy and many of the other 30 numbers featured.
What lifts this show above the average juke box musicals is that, despite tragically dying so young along with Big Bopper and Richie Valens in that air crash when leaving Clear Lake, and with a short professional career, Buddy Holly left behind a tremendous volume of classic rock ‘n’roll work as singer and composer. Writer Alan Janes may have sanitised Buddy’s personal life, and with so much music to be heard there is little room for the characters to be fully drawn, but there is enough there to give you an insight into this remarkable talent, and a cast on hand to do the story of Holly and the others justice.
Well worth a visit for any musical theatre fan, and a must if you are one of Buddy Holly’s legions of followers, if you can’t catch up with the production in Bath you will find it in Exeter’s Northcott Theatre from 19th to 24th January, Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre between January 27th and 31st, and at the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton from 21st to 23rd May.
GRP