On Saturday afternoon at 4pm, a landmark was passed. Thriller Live opened its 3,000th performance at the Lyric theatre in London. A cheerful tribute to Michael Jackson, it was already the longest-running show in the Lyric’s history – and seven years after opening, the theatre still sells an average of 80% of its 915 seats for each performance. It is already booking until April next year, and a regional tour that started last week is taking in eight towns and cities between now and July.
It’s all testament to the boundless appetite of the British public for hearing songs performed by people who sometimes – but not usually – look like the people who first performed them, and who sometimes – but not usually – sound like the people who first performed them.
The first jukebox musical in Britain was Jack Good and Ray Cooney’s Elvis, which opened in 1977, the show that helped turn Shakin’ Stevens from a John Peel favourite and stalwart of Communist party benefits into a staple of light entertainment. A decade or so later, Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story, opened in the West End, running for 13 years, and ensuring a generation of Londoners became incapable of hearing Holly’s name without appending the Sun quote from the posters – “It’s Buddy brilliant!”
The explosion in jukebox musicals, the point at which they became the go-to shows for impresarios seeking a guaranteed buck, came when Abba granted permission for their songs to feature in Mamma Mia!, which opened in 1999 and is still running. Since then, pretty much any artist with a catalogue greater than a couple of albums and a fanbase wealthy enough to pay for theatre tickets has had their own show. The fact is, though, that they aren’t a guaranteed buck. For every We Will Rock You, there’s a Viva Forever – the Spice Girls show that lost £5m and closed within a year.
Nevertheless, they are still thriving, and so with Motown the Musical opening, I was set the challenge of going to as many West End jukebox musicals as I could, and trying to work out – as the Guardian’s music editor, rather than a theatre critic – the appeal. There are five on my list, culminating in Motown. Before that, in three weeks, I have to fit in Beautiful – The Carole King Musical, Thriller Live, Jersey Boys and Sunny Afternoon.
At Thriller Live, I’m sitting next to a group of women who want to know why I’ve been taking notes. I tell them, and ask in return why they’ve come to see a particularly slick Britain’s Got Talent version of Michael Jackson’s music. Colette, in the seat next to me, explains that it’s not all about the music, and it’s not all about the theatre. It’s a social thing – she and her friends come down from Cheshire two or three times a year to do some shopping and see a show. And they like jukebox musicals – they know the songs, it’s a bit of fun. They’ve already seen most of the shows on my list, but they’re ruling out Motown, at least until good seats are available at more reasonable prices (top price tickets in the stalls are an eye-watering £120).
It’s certainly true that jukebox musical audiences are not like the crowds at gigs or plays. They’re chattier than you get at Wolf Hall, for starters. During Thriller Live, excitingly, a fight breaks out in the stalls – just at the point we are being told what a great force for good in the world Michael Jackson was – which you rarely get at the Donmar. They’re also more forgiving than crowds at gigs; they greet every performance with enthusiasm, and it only takes the slightest encouragement for an audience to be on its feet, clapping along.
There are three kinds of jukebox musical: the one in which the song-and-dance routines are churned out one after the other, with no pretence at plot, just a little bit of narration (Thriller Live); the one that shoehorns songs from one artist or genre into a plot unrelated to the artists concerned (We Will Rock You, Rock of Ages – the hair metal musical that was by some distance the worst night I’ve ever had in a theatre, in which Starship’s We Built This City was cued up by a discussion about urban planning); and the biography. Apart from Thriller, all the shows I see fit into this last category.
The big problem with the biographical format, as everyone who’s ever watched a rockumentary knows, is that there’s really only one story: it begins with camaraderie and passion and excitement, it progresses to conquering the world, at which point ennui and conflict creep in (often exacerbated by drugs and alcohol), and the principals start to hate each other. Finally, but not always, there’s resolution – the reunion, the realisation that the best times were before they got famous, when it was all for fun and no one was making money out of them.
Motown, Beautiful, Sunny Afternoon and Jersey Boys all cleave to that path to varying degrees. Motown sees the soul label through the eyes of its founder, Berry Gordy, portraying its story not as about Gordy managing to alienate key artists and writers by screwing them over, but how – like an R&B Lear – he was betrayed by those he had made great, until finally they come to honour him (bizarrely it also manages to almost completely excise Stevie Wonder, the label’s presiding genius, and portray Smokey Robinson as Detroit’s genial village idiot).
Beautiful has the slight problem that Carole King is the least interesting person in her own story – a writer of incredible melodies, whose greatest aspiration appeared to be living in a nice house in the New York suburbs – and so has to rely on the characters of Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil to generate drama. Sunny Afternoon has the story of the wars between the Kinks’ Ray and Dave Davies to provide its heart, and it’s also the only one of the shows that does something with its songs other than set them up with a series of “Gee, you’ll never guess what I’ve just written!” – as when Stop Your Sobbing becomes a commentary on his relationship with his first wife, Rasa. Jersey Boys, the tale of the Four Seasons, has a surprisingly strong story arc, thanks to the group’s links to the New Jersey mob, and the conflict that generated between their artistic heart – Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio – and their founder, Tommy DeVito.
Everyone’s stories are condensed into a series of snapshots from a brief period. Beautiful begins in the late 50s, and ends with Carole King releasing Tapestry in 1971. Sunny Afternoon, to all intents and purposes, ends with the release of Lola in 1970, despite an encore that shifts us forward to the band headlining Madison Square Garden in 1981. Both Motown and Jersey Boys dwell on the 60s, skipping through the subsequent decades in moments. But you’re not going to these shows for the history, you’re going for the songs.
Sadly, Motown fails here. Too many songs are truncated, too many minor tracks included at the expense of classics (in this version of the story, Diana Ross going solo is the defining moment in Motown history). Thriller Live can’t really go wrong, given the riches at its disposal. Jersey Boys makes a decent stab at making the case for Bob Gaudio as the Brian Wilson of the east coast. Beautiful passes in a blur of wonderful songs, but the winner is Sunny Afternoon. That’s not because Davies’ songs are better – he has perhaps written fewer unimpeachable classics than King, and no individual artist has a catalogue to match Motown – but because Sunny Afternoon is the only show that treats its music as rock’n’roll. It’s a surprise and a thrill to realise You Really Got Me is going to be played at gig volume rather than cabaret volume, and it’s the only show in which you feel the thwump of the bass in your sternum.
By the end of my run, I’m starting to feel as if I’m starring in my own rockumentary. What started in enthusiasm has progressed to ennui – another night, another show. The interval drinks begin to assume a central role. Like a touring musician carping about hotels and tour buses, I’m obsessing over legroom in the theatres, and beginning to hate the people sitting around me – put away your phone! Stop kicking my seat! Don’t take up the whole armrest!
Come the last night, at the Motown show, I finally crack. I slip out before the encore begins, to the surprise and irritation of the other people in my row. All I can think about is getting to the pub. It’s time to stop this madness. Stop! In the Name of Love.
- This article was amended on 16 March 2016. Mamma Mia! opened in 1999, not 1989 as originally stated.
