Not a Book: Sister Act – the Musical

I braved the theatre during half term week and lived to tell the tale! I wish I could say I was being strategic with my show pick and picked one where I thought there would be less children, but I would be lying – I went to Sister Act because it’s a short summer run and there’s a cast change coming at the end of this coming week, and the fact that there was a front row ticket in the lottery on the day was an added bonus!

This is the musical version of the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie about a lounge singer who sees her casino boss boyfriend have someone murdered and is hidden in a convent for her own safety until she can give evidence at his trial. The first thing to note is that there are a fair few changes between the movie and the musical – the most obvious being that it has an all new set of songs written by Alan Menken, the composer who wrote the music for a string of Disney movies in the early 1990s, like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Do not go expecting to hear any of the Motown hits from the movie – or Hail Holy Queen etc. it’s also set in the late 1970s rather than the early 90s, Doloris’s boyfriend owns a club that he won’t let her sing at – rather than a casino where she does sing at – and it’s set in Philadelphia rather than Reno and Adam Francisco.

I thought the changes really worked – if you can’t have the music from the movie – which I assume would have been near impossible on a licensing front for the Motown front, especially given that there were a few jukebox musicals using some of the artists music at around the same time – then make some changes to make it its own thing. It was obviously going to need more music than the movie had – and more characters were going to need to sing, so it worked really well.

I didn’t see this when it was in the West End originally – I didn’t have the budget for theatre going at the time and I was also working a job where I started at 4 am so late nights were not my friend – but this has got a cracking cast at the moment, so I feel like I might have picked the right time. Beverley Knight is playing Doloris and Ruth Jones is playing Mother Superior – later on this summer Alexandra Burke takes over as Doloris and Lee Mead joins as Detective Eddie Souther. It’s also got Lemar – who I always thought deserved a bigger music career than he got – playing Doloris’ boyfriend.

Basically this is a big, fun, colourful night in the theatre – in fact in a theatre where I spent a lot of time as a teenager, but that’s a story for another day.

Have a great Sunday everyone.