LondonMusicalReview

Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World: The Musical – The Other Palace, London

Reviewer: Maryam Philpott

Stage Adaptation: Chris Bush

Music: Miranda Cooper and Jennifer Decilveo

Lyrics: Chris Bush and Miranda Cooper

Director: Amy Hodge

Women are great. There shouldn’t really be a need to say very much more than that but unfortunately history – largely written and performed by men – hasn’t always thought so, leading Kate Pankhurst to write a series of children’s books celebrating the impressive women who have fought against their age and become significant. Chris Bush, Miranda Cooper and Jennifer Decilveo translate all of that into their new family-friendly stage show Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World: The Musical which returns to the Other Palace following an earlier run in 2022.

On a school trip to the museum, Jade becomes separated from her class. Clearly forgotten by her teachers, she wanders into a closed exhibition space where she meets some of the great women of history including Amelia Erhart, Sacagawea and Marie Curie. Characters join forces to help Jade understand her role in the world and how she too can become great.

Bush’s stage adaptation is a high-energy 80-minutes that clearly takes inspiration from the pop concert performance style of shows like Six (they share a producer) which introduces individual characters and gives them some agency to sing about their own achievements. Placing this within a learning structure for Jade is useful and the character’s growing sense of empowerment is designed to mirror the experience of young audience members discovering some of these inspiring stories for the first time.

The choice of subjects and the slightly haphazard groupings is endlessly debatable – are there really sufficient parallels between Frida Kahlo and Jane Austen to warrant their combined segment, one which is dominated by Kahlo’s song World of Colour about painting her own reality? Inspiring stuff despite the strange inclusion of Day of the Dead masks, but Austen is rather relegated to a minor role. Bush and team also place some people called Mary and Marie together (Seacole, Anning and Curie) just for an alliterative song, while Rosa Parks and Anne Frank end up in the final segment together.

Why these women in this configuration is never clear, and there’s no one to represent pre-nineteenth-century periods or the last 70 years when women have also definitely been great. But the show does well to summarise most of these stories in innovative ways, including Gertrude Ederle’s English Channel swim with some shimmery fabric that actor Charlotte Jaconelli emerges through. The music by Cooper and Decilveo is a high point with lots of styles and set piece numbers that power through the show to create many rousing moments including the Suffragette-inspired Deeds Not Words led by Meg Hateley as a militaristic Emmeline Pankhurst.

Aimed at the 7+ age group, and perhaps not directed at the largely adult Press Night audience, the tone and presentation style certainly feel young, with a simplicity of messaging – that Jade can be great just by existing – that will land well with families. Older children might look for stronger narrative content but at any age, it’s worth spending 80 minutes being reminded that women are great; you really can’t hear that enough.

Runs until8 September 2024

The Reviews Hub Score

Great

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The Reviews Hub London is under the editorship of Richard Maguire. The Reviews Hub was set up in 2007. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.

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