Best New Musical of 2015, Olivier award-winning Sunny Afternoon should be packing them at in the Bristol Hippodrome this week.
Combining the music and lyrics of Ray Davies with Joe Penhall’s biographical book of the singer songwriter, Sunny Afternoon tells the story of The Kinks getting their break in the music business and their subsequent travails with managers, money men and unions, on an upward but sometimes tempestuous trajectory to rock’n’roll fame.
As a ‘juke-box musical’– there are 28 Kinks hits to enjoy here – the production doesn’t disappoint. Occasionally however, Ray Davies’s tunes seemed to be handed out too cheaply to the minor roles in the production and given incongruous vaudevillian treatment, complete with dancing girl glitz. The show sometimes suffered a disconnect with the more gritty side of the Kinks backstory as a result. But as the narrative developed, the chemistry between the band members, the brothers Ray (Ryan O’Donnell) and Dave, played with great flamboyance by Mark Newnham, and later between Ray and his girlfriend/wife, Rasa, played by Lisa Wright, was allowed to develop sufficiently between numbers.
O’Donnell put in an extraordinary shift, singing over 20 hits. He managed to remain his own man throughout, but effectively caught Davies’s seeming insouciance, then nervous collapse convincingly. During classics such as Waterloo Sunset, and aided by the excellent playing of the cast, he touched close to Davies’s nostalgic and plaintive vocal qualities. In passages about the premature death of Davies’s sister, lonely calls home from the States and later when talking the bass player, Pete Quaife (Garmon Rhys), into staying with the band by revealing his own insecurities, he portrayed Ray Davies as having a deeply sensitive soul behind a foppish front.
Newnham’s Dave Davies lit up the night with an unapologetic and gutsy portrayal of a man drowning in an excess of booze and women, given to extreme bouts of aggression on stage and off. But his devil-may-care attitude was balanced here with some keen observation of his guitar-playing creativity. His raucous riffs for All day and All of the Night certainly loosened the mortar between the Hippodrome bricks.
On a stage lined from floor to ceiling with amplifier cones, the action started with the band members of the Kinks performing as a backing band, The Ravens. It was old One-Nation Tory Britain under Macmillan, and tastes in live music were about to change big time. A familiar tale followed – naïve, young talented working-class musos taken for a ride by everyone with an eye for a quick buck. But Davies’s salvation was to be able, always, to find the lyrics to lampoon life with a satirical edge, coupled with a peculiarly English sense of nostalgia. The craft in his writing will remain timeless.
In a final salvo of hits, musical became more of a straightforward gig. Out came some of the big guns: Lola, You Really Got Me and of course Sunny Afternoon itself. By that time the Hippodrome crowd were on their feet, egged on by the irrepressible ‘Dave Davies’ wielding his ‘axe’. No matter that the story simply evaporated into a Waterloo sunset. ★★★☆☆ Simon Bishop 8th March 2017
