Summer in the City
Upstairs at the Gatehouse
 

OVATION’S Christmas show is a jukebox musical in which the tunes burst out of the jukebox and threaten to throttle the story. But that’s no great pity as the plot is only a device to showcase the songs of the ’60s. And what wonderful songs they are, full of vitality and heartfelt emotion, throbbing with joy.

Audiences of a mellow age are time-warped back to those heady days to wallow in hazy memories of rock and pop and groovy mayhem while younger people will find out just what they have missed.

Set in a cafe in Carnaby Street Soho, (which I assume is modelled on the 2i’s coffee bar which  spawned rock’n’roll in this country), whose owner Hetty (Helen Goldwyn) a wise, Jewish mother hen type employs as coffee boy Sam (Connor Arnold), a square-jawed American who’s a dead ringer for Superman and delivers the coffee with oodles of entrepreneurial pizzazz and go-getterism.

In wafts Joanna (Eliza Shea), a journalist who is later joined by Bobby (Harry Curley), a brash Scouse photographer in the mould of swinging ’60s icon David Bailey.  

They are completed by traffic warden Vera (Elizabeth Walker) and fashion design student Cassie (Candis Butler Jones) — Mary Quant anyone?

All, it transpires, have musical ambitions — it is the ’60s after all — and so, osmosis-like a girl band forms to out-supreme the Supremes with Vera as lead singer and the others doing the do-wahs and sha-la-la-las.

Mercifully, each gobbet or two of dialogue is followed by a humdinger of a ’60s belter and it is intriguing to wonder which came first, plot or song.

The five-piece band led by Curtis Lavender manages to sound like a 20-piece orchestra at times and the music is brilliantly interpreted by this talented cast who all sing and dance to perfection.

Summer in the City is ideal for a yuletide winter in this city.

The sad news is that this will be Ovation’s last production here. John Plews said he has had a whale of a time at the Gatehouse. So have we.

Runs until January 15 2023. Box office: (020) 8340-3488, upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com