Six Ways

Musical Theatre @ George Square    8 - 30 August @ 14.00    Sell a Door Theatre Company

Three young couples navigate their way through the minefield of marriage in this Patrick Marberesque musical. Carly and Chris (played engagingly by Katie Bernstein and Adam Search) struggle with financial pressures, and a rather underdeveloped plot line centred on his gambling addiction. Carly cleans for couple number two, Wendy and Michael (Terri O’Ryan and Paddy Clarke), she – pregnant and hormonal, he – frightened and unable to commit. Couple number three is budding politician Diane, Wendy’s sister, and her unlikely husband Daryl, a drag artiste, (two strong performances from Victoria Hardy and Sam Thackray).

Occasionally this musical shows flashes of promise, particularly in the book writing of David Hutchinson, notably in the telephone call that introduces us to the relationship between the two sisters, and later in the recriminations that follow Daryl’s decision to abandon his chosen profession. Hutchinson also finds an interesting narrative pace and dramatic energy when intercutting between the couples, a device that works well in television soap opera, but needed a more accomplished director to be effective on stage. For the most part the plotting was unsurprising, lacking in subtlety and in the case of Carly and Chris’s thread desperately underwritten.

Theatrically the musical took off with Sam Thackray’s brilliantly performed, show stopping, drag number, and mirroring it later in the show with his wife’s political speech is a great idea; however the number itself is undermined, for all its bravura, by a lack of wit and the second by the decision to introduce Diane’s husband.