I recently saw Ghost live on stage at the Aylesbury Waterside Theatre, and it’s a musical which I’ve been wanting to see during previous runs, but have only just gotten the chance to watch.
I’m a big fan of the movie, and so in this review will try my both give my view of the show as an adaptation of the film, and give my views on it as a standalone piece which ideally, you should be able to enjoy without prior knowledge of the film it’s based on.
As a fan of the movie, it did a great job to retell the story of Sam Wheat, a man who is murdered, but whose ghost hangs on to solve his murder and protect Molly Jenson, who is the woman he loves.
The film starred Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, and is perhaps most famous for it’s pottery wheel love scene which was set to the Everly Brothers singing Unchained Melody. Well, it’s easy to see that scene was probably the starting point for someone wanting to turn the whole thing into a West End musical.
The cast in the production we saw in Aylesbury all did a fine job, although I felt Rebekah Lowings as Molly was the strongest throughout. Josh St Clair did a good job as Sam, but felt he didn’t quite hit the emotional punch needed for Sam. In truth, having also seen two productions of Dirty Dancing on stage, I feel its actually a really tough job to fill the shoes left by Patrick Swayze who brought an equal strength and sensitivity to his roles, whilst also hitting comedy and action perfectly in his role as Sam.
Truth be told, I think the adaptation is somewhat at fault to diminish some of the gravity of the scenes and made some things feel a little light in the wrong places. If you remember the look on Patrick Swayze’s face when Sam sees his own dead body in the movie, he had to do a lot to portray the horror of what he was taking in, in that moment of realization that is he dead. The stage musical using a moment of misdirection of Sam looking at the light as they slip in a body double to be Sam’s dead body, and Sam now looks away from his body to comment that the lights are beautiful in a change that entirely missed the emotional point from the film. I know why they did it so there could be two Sams, but it meant missing a huge moment for Sam.
Likewise, the musical then cuts to the hospital where Sam meets an older ghost who explains about being a ghost, which in this production was played by Entertainment legend Les Dennis. Les did a good job, but again, having an almost light hearted and at times comedic song a minute after Sam has just been murdered really dissipated the weight of what had just happened.
Certainly when compared to the film I think these points, which I give as examples, highlight how the source material could have been better handled to preserve the seriousness of some of the darker moments in the story, but taking the show entirely on it’s own merits, I can say that if they had pushed harder on the darker moments, it would have added more, but as it was, it was still an enjoyable show.
I will have a separate article up on the site where I go over all the changes made to the musical from the movie version as I have with other musical adaptations with films, but the best change in the show was Molly listening to Unchained Melody on the radio and it making her remember Sam as he had sung it to her earlier in the show.
Jacqui Dubois is great as psychic Oda Mae Brown, and does a fantastic job of giving a faithful version of Oda Mae as played by Whoopi Goldberg in the movie. For the story of Ghost, Oda Mae both gives the story a lot of opportunity for humour and still adds to the serious scenes when called upon. I enjoyed a few new ideas such as Oda Mae stealing many pens and her always going the wrong direction to Sam’s voice (as a psychic she can only hear Sam and not see him).
Most of the songs created for the show are great and there is a mix of big emotional and love songs and some lighter hearted ones in there. The one that didn’t do it for me at all was the song of the train ghost who gave a strange William Shatner sung spoken rap, which I think was meant to sound ‘street’ but wasn’t anything like the character for the film and what it was didn’t work at all.
I think the show did a good job of translating the story to the stage, but it was light on ghostly special effects which was a disappointment, as I feel like this is a show that could be spectacular if they had devised ways to make ghosts walk through objects, or had a scene perhaps from the perspective of someone who couldn’t see Sam, and have objects move on their own as you see in the film. Ther biggest miss on this front was not doing a version of the evil demon ghosts who take bad people to hell. Again, I’ll discuss these and other changes in more detail in my article explaining the changes between the musical and the film.
Conclusion
If you’re a fan of the fan, you’re likely to enjoy this a lot. I really enjoyed it, but I can also recognise that it didn’t live up to my expectations of an adaptation of what I think it could be on stage. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, there is still a really good story here, and the songs are well written and performances are great across the board.
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