Fly Eddie Fly tells the story of national icon and local Cheltenham celebrity Michael ‘Eddie the Eagle’ Edwards on his journey from skiing enthusiast to Olympian and beyond. The production is a musical emerging from a three-hander developed in-house at the Everyman a few years ago, with the major additions to the piece being the musical numbers and the presence of Eddie the Eagle himself.

There are some lamentable rough edges to the production that honestly need polishing. The blocking is very static, actors simply occupy space on stage rather than inhabiting and moving around it. Crowd scenes absorb too much sound from the chorus of performers. Scene transitions lack incidental music to quickly and neatly indicate a change in locale. The run-time is very strongly weighted to the front half, so there is a rather uneven pacing to the acts of the story.

Having said Fly Eddie Fly needs to iron out some of its production issues, there is good material here shining through the shortcomings. As you would expect, this is a feel-good crowd-pleaser about perseverance and determination. A broad thematic target but one appropriately channelled through the story of Eddie the Eagle. What I found a surprisingly focussed message within that was how much a lack of wealth and privilege are a barrier into elite sports.

Usually these general audience narratives pay lip service to overcoming social disadvantages but this is swiftly brushed under the carpet to make way for schmaltzy sentiment and simpler issues. Here, the persistent struggles of Eddie are rooted in that context: he has to work extensively to secure the basic funds to train and get to the slopes, live in shoddy accommodation, put his family in precarious financial straits, tolerate snobbery and endemic low expectations because of his background. It is not a nebulous wishy-washy malaise of self-doubt that Eddie is challenging but a lot of deeply entrenched structural biases.

That is not to say this is a dry piece about the economic barriers imposed by the world of elite sport. This is a feel-good musical about a national darling, but one that I think needs credit for thoroughness and attention to theme in its storytelling.

As a chirpy musical Fly Eddie Fly certainly endeared itself to the audience. Supplemented in parts by the Company and members of the Everyman’s Youth Theatre, most of the musical heavy-lifting was performed by Nik Howden as Eddie and Becks Grant-Jones as his mother. Whilst emotive, I actually found the clear delivery of the songs in Gloucestershire accents was central to the appeal – it speaks to the local pride invested in the story.

The other major aspect of Fly Eddie Fly is that we not only get Nik Howden performing as Eddie, but the man himself is a presence on stage narrating and editorialising the story. This adds a slightly pantomimic air but one that is played appropriately for laughs (and that goes some way to excuse those ropier aspects in the production) and enables some good-natured ribbing of its subject too. If nothing else, what shines through is the sincerity of Eddie’s character.

There are indeed aspects that can be improved upon here. Fly Eddie Fly is a solid, all ages, mass appeal musical but one that is intermittently hampered by issues that could probably be ironed out by another week in rehearsal.   ★★★☆☆    Fenton Coulthurst   24^th May 2019