Writer and Director: Tim French
Danny and Billy are on a sort of low-rent pilgrimage to find Danny’s father. He is a singer, an Elvis Presley impersonator, in a sad pub in a sad out-of-season seaside town, and nothing about the set-up raises any expectation that this reunion will go well.
Danny and Billy arrive in the pub with a singerless band already set up and playing, and this is the first of a number of nice surprises this production offers – the band are really good. They look like a band that has been round so many blocks they’ve lost count, happy to play weddings and bar-mitzvahs, with the sort of dead-eyed calculation that enables them to stop halfway through a song if their contracted 90 minutes is up, and yet… Dan Patterson plays discreet rhythm on his keyboard, Kevin Wiremu keeps everyone honest with supple, clean drum patterns, and up-front, Rob Hinton makes nice noises on guitar and Ken Cooke plays a magisterial five-string bass. Nothing flash, just solid, interesting rock’n’roll.
This is a big clue as to the production’s strengths. The boys and the folk that the boys meet in the pub – Danny’s mum (Kathryn Haywood), a pot-girl cum hostess cum landlord’s daughter (Molly Brann) – all get moments in the spotlight singing, and they’re all good. Even more impressive, Billy (Niall Hemingway) and the mum and the pot-girl all sing backup harmonies to the two principals, and they sound really beautiful. Danny (Michael Gillett) and his dad (Tim French) sing a variety of songs that cleverly pastiche rock’n’roll classics, offering just a suggestion of Blue Suede Shoes or Tutti Frutti with repurposed, plot-developing lyrics.
Things aren’t quite as happy when the company are speaking. There is some pretty clunky dialogue, some jokes that don’t really land, and an awful lot of exposition. Molly Brann and Niall Hemingway have a quite delicate courtship/ seduction and they sound like people talking to each other, but much of the rest of the dialogue is very laboured.
Tim French has given himself a lot to do – writer, director, central role as Danny’s absentee dad, and main singer. Another set of ears might have produced a more fluent script. There are some amusing riffs from Frank the Bouncer (David Cramer) that are well-delivered but slightly off-key. Frank, despite his professed love for Miles Davis, is an unpleasant man, and that characterisation should be better reflected in his dialogue. David Cramer is funny, for all that.
That said, it’s a good-hearted, fast-moving, emotionally satisfying show. It doesn’t demand a lot of analysis, and a taste for 1950s rock stylings is probably essential, but it’s a nice way to spend two hours. And then there’s Ken Cooke’s bass playing that soars into the mix in the second half. A well-deserved 3.5 stars for the whole show, 4 stars for the bass solo.
Runs until 4 November 2023
