SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (Performance Preparation Academy)***

 

By Imogen

Link: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/surrey/performance-preparation-academy/saturday-night-fever/e-gjqdde  £22 adult, £17 concession, PPA graduate £12, PPA student £5. + booking fee

Available until: This production must be watched live. There are livestreams Thursday-Saturday at 7pm and a Saturday matinee at 2.30pm

In some ways this musical seems so old-fashioned. The idea that if you get pregnant you have to marry the guy or have an abortion. There’s nothing about adoption or being a single mum or giving it to your parents to look after. There were only 2 options, abortion or marriage. I do think it’s good it’s basically the girl’s decision, if she won’t get an abortion then the marriage has to happen. But I’m glad we’ve moved on from that.

But I think a lot of it is still relevant now? One of the characters has mental health issues, he wants to talk but no one will listen and he doesn’t cope very well. That’s relevant now, everyone’s going on about mental health problems and how important it is to talk but there’s still loads of people who just won’t listen. I think Saturday Night Fever shows it’s not a new problem with millennials being snowflakes, it’s always been there.

Then there are the guys who keep pressuring the girls to have sex. That totally happens now. I would actually be quite offended if a guy didn’t want to have sex with me but that doesn’t mean I’d say yes. I was quite surprised the pressure would happen when they had the threat of marriage hanging over them if the condom broke but some of the guys get quite forceful and that’s not right. If a girl is crazy enough to say no to a guy like Tony Manero that’s her decision and he’s got to live with it.

I don’t think it’s a great musical. The music is really old and it’s a juke box musical so the songs aren’t written for the characters. The singing is totally fine but it didn’t wow me. Jess Ellen’s choreography was ok, not amazing but maybe they wanted to keep rehearsal time short, they probably did it in bubbles. Or maybe they didn’t want to make them all look like pro dancers. To be fair they all look like pros in Grease and they’re just high school kids. (But why are there so many musicals about dance contests? There are other ways of making characters dance.)

The actors were good at the actual acting but I think a lot of them looked too old. It wasn’t their faces so much, it was their clothes. I get that they’re probably wearing the right clothes for the time when the musical was set but you’d have to be really old to dress like that now. I’ve seen Grease and their clothes aren’t the kind of clothes you’d wear now but they aren’t the kind of clothes anyone would wear now so you still accept them as teens. Have costumes that are true to the times if you want but maybe mix it up a bit so they don’t look like teens dressed up as their parents?

Jack Frewin is quite hot as Tony but it’s hard to know what to think of him as a character. I think he does care about other people but he also behaves like a twit. Which I’d spell with an A if I was allowed. Summer-Kaia Mulready does seem like a bit of a snob as Stephanie but at least she has class unlike some people. But Gina Leckey makes Annette seem more desperate than a slut. I think Benjy Smokler is really good as Bobby C, I didn’t like him at first but his final scene is really convincing. It’s a really hard scene to stage but the boys made it work with their acting.