Review: SISTER ACT Press Night, June 2nd 2009

Sister Act (London Palladium) * * *

However much they're spending on the sizeable cast of this glitzy production, it's definitely worth it. Sheila Hancock and Ian Lavender may be the big names as far as a UK audience is concerned, and the residual love for the film and Whoopi Goldberg will sell tickets, but it'll be Patina Miller who gets the plaudits - and rightly so.

Frankly, she's worth the admission price alone, from the moment she steps on stage to the moment she takes her curtain call, complete with fur stole.  The one minor criticism would be that she has far too much beauty, talent, charisma and star quality to be at all believable as a struggling lounge singer with a dead-end career, but she is so amazing that it doesn't matter.

Deloris's trio of supporting nuns, Katie Rowley Jones, Julia Sutton and Claire Greenway are all fabulous, and as for the massed ranks of the choir, their combined voices fill the Palladium with ease.

It's just a shame that the material they have to work with isn't as strong as one might hope.  There are one or two showstopping numbers, but it's certainly not Alan Menken's best score (although having said that, Menken on an off-day is still better than most other composers at the top of their game).  The lyrics by Glenn Slater zigzag between being incredibly clever and incredibly trite, and the book struggles to balance the comedy and the emotion.

Sister Act has the same problem as 9 to 5 - its source material is a movie that focuses on the friendship of women, and now it has transferred to the stage, the decision has been made to flesh out the male characters more.  But making the bad guy the comic relief sits uneasily here - hearing our troupe of gangsters sing about the multiple ways they would like to murder our heroine isn't a comfortable experience.  And as with 9 to 5, a flimsy and unnecessary romantic sub-plot is woven in, though at least there's an attempt to provide some justification for it.

Regardless, it's a fun evening out - the star-studded crowd at this press night seemed to enjoy it, anyway. And any show with such incredible vocals from such an incredible cast has got to be worth seeing.

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