Greatest Days The Musical is the official Take That Musical. For fans of Take That’s music, I’m sure you’ll have a great time, but is it something for everyone else? Let’s find out.
I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy the show, as I’m not really the target demographic. I wasn’t the only guy there, but like most other guys there I knew we were only there with our girlfriends or wives. Still, I perhaps lived through Take That mania more first hand as I’m a couple of years older than my girlfriend who was from the slightly later West Life generation.
And I’ll be honest, when Take That got back together after 20 years I was pleased for them. I like a good comeback story.
But for fans of Take That expecting this to tell their story, I have some bad news. This show isn’t biographical. And despite it being the official Take That musical, you won’t hear Take That referenced by name a single time in the show. This is due to some weird rights issue it would seem. They use all the songs, but there’s no name dropping of the likes of Robbie Williams, Gary Barlow…or the other ones.
Instead the show features their songs and tells the story of five teenage girls who are school friends and mega fans of…The Boys…as they are always referenced as.
The show is split into two time periods with the first half of the show following the teenage girls as they go to watch…the Boys live in concert. The second act is the same girls thirty years later who have something of a reunion themselves to go and watch…the Men who are also doing a reunion show.
For me the show can be summed up as Blood Brothers crossed with Mamma Mia, but with Take That songs instead of Abba.
Just as in Blood Brothers the first half shows the main characters as children and is mostly light hearted. We learn about the characters and have a few more serious moments, and this includes that the girls make a pledge to each other to always be friends and meet up in thirty years…or something like that. It was basically the blood spit handshake thing from Blood Brothers.
Then the second act has the characters older and not achieved things in life that they had wanted, which is also like in Blood Brothers. The difference here is that they do have younger and older cast members to play the same characters rather than the same actor play both ages as seen in Blood Brothers.
The older characters then go off to a Greek Island and recapture their youth and reminisce which is basically Mamma Mia. It even ends with a wedding.
But whilst this is all good and well there is one choice that was made that really didn’t work for me and that was The Boys.
The Boys sang and danced, but they weren’t actively part of the story. Basically they weren’t characters, had no dialogue and didn’t interact with the main girls at all. Quite literally you could have played a projection of Take That singing and the story would have been the same.
At times the girls would sing or join in singing to help advance their story but mostly the boys just sang the Take That songs as if they were on TV or the radio. For me this was a huge disconnect. At times they’d sing and the songs would reflect the mood the girls were in, but to have a musical where the main characters don’t do most of the singing means the characters going through the situations weren’t expressing their feelings through the songs themselves.
I could mostly look past that the Boys were often just plonked about the stage like silent fairies or angels overseeing the action, but when they’d often just be used to reshape the staging blocks it felt like the representation of the Take That group were just glorified stage hands.
Still, even though I didn’t like the balance of having the Boys sing, but at the same time not be needed to tell the story, I still enjoyed the show for what it was.
Mamma Mia uses ABBA’s songs, but isn’t about ABBA, whilst Jersey Boys is about Frankie Vallie and tells his story. This is something in between as whilst it doesn’t tell the story of Take That at all, it follows a fans perspective.
There’s a lot of humour in the show and most of it landed, and it did hit a few emotional points that I didn’t expect it to going in.
Overall I’d say this is mostly something for Take That fans, although some of them may still feel underwhelmed by this as it’s not really a celebration of the group. For non Take That fans the show is accessible in that you literally don’t need to know anything about Take That to follow it.
It was a fun, inoffensive musical that was enjoyable enough, but won’t be one I’ll be raving about for years to come.
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