Here & Now review – Steps supermarket musical is a sweep of bangers, bops and ballads

Manchester Opera HouseEndlessly entertaining jukebox show frames its plot around a seaside store’s workers to purvey the band’s hitsUnder a stark spotlight a woman sings an ode to her stillborn son who was “born sleeping” 13 years previously. “You are only a heartbeat away,” she sings. “And my love one day will find you.” It’s a beautiful, sombre moment, made all the more moving by the fact that 10 minutes earlier the same character was line-dancing to dance-pop hoedown 5,6,7,8 with a giant cardboard cutout of a cactus on her head.Welcome to the whiplash world of Here & Now, the latest in a lengthy line of jukebox musicals based around pop back catalogues. This one – directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, with a book by Shaun Kitchener – fuses the myriad hits of Steps on to a storyline based in a seaside supermarket, Better Best Bargains. There we find best friends Caz (an excellent Rebecca Lock), Vel (Jacqui Dubois), Robbie (Blake Patrick Anderson) and Neeta (Rosie Singha), each determined to have a “summer of love” and change their lives while dealing with, variously, useless straight men, pesky adoption agencies, anxiety, latent homosexuality, daddy issues, and via an odd end-of-act-one twist, a faux French ladies man turned capitalist landlord scumbag. Continue reading...

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