There’s a fittingly lo-fi, “let’s do the show right here” vibe to this charming musical. It’s adapted from John Carney’s 2016 film about a teenager putting a band together to impress a girl in the depressed, god-bothered Dublin of 1985. A talented young ensemble of multi-instrumentalist actors – many of them recent graduates or still in education – is led by Sheridan Townsley, making a charismatic stage debut as our hero Conor.
The dialogue, characters and scenarios of the movie have been tweaked and in some cases coarsened in Enda Walsh’s stage script. But the new and original 80s-style pop songs – by Carney and Gary Clark, who also does the orchestration and arrangement here – are irresistibly catchy and uplifting. And Rebecca Taichman’s staging has an exuberant energy all its own.
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Conor’s dad is out of work, his parents are splitting up and his brother Brendan is psychologically unable to leave the house. At 15 he is removed from his private school and sent to the harsh Christian Brothers’ institution Synge Street, where the presiding priest Brother Baxter (Lloyd Hutchinson) proves as brutal as the skinhead, Barry (Jack James Ryan), who stalks the playground.
Instantly smitten by 16-year-old would-be model Raphina (Grace Collender), a vision in ripped lace and ankle boots who hangs around the local phone booth, he asks her to star in a video for his non-existent band. When she accepts, he hurriedly puts together a team of oddballs and misfits, calls them Sing Street (see what they did there?) and starts creating music inspired by Duran Duran, The Cure, or whichever other artist music-snob Brendan introduces him to.
As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, albeit in London, I found the cocktail of romantic desperation and threatened violence as evocative as the snatches of The Smiths and M’s 1979 hit Pop Music (still the best song of the era, m’lud). Conor’s is a classic coming-of-age tale, as he navigates first love, finds his voice and stands up for himself.
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The journey seems slicker and easier here than in film. On screen, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo’s Conor was blushingly diffident and initially a mediocre vocalist. Townsley sounds and looks like a pop idol, with soulful eyes and cheekbones you could cut paper with. Collander’s Raphina is more obviously damaged but more quickly mended; she and Adam Hunter’s Brendan each get their own song here too.
Cinematic set-pieces like the two sea voyages and the Back to the Future fantasy sequence have necessarily been reworked. Walsh has modestly boosted the underwritten role of Conor’s sister Anne (Tateyana Arutura) and of the only black band member, Eamon (Jesse Nyakudya), but it’s still inevitably a work driven by pallid, thwarted testosterone.
Taichman mounts it on a mostly empty stage, with keyboards and a drumkit zipping on and off on casters, alongside the family sofa and the phone box. The level of musicianship is incredible, the cast swapping instruments as if they are trading bubblegum cards. The teenage thrill of performing music live on stage and the camaraderie of being in a band has an authentic tang. This delightful show has the energy and immediacy of your favourite band’s first gig.
To 23 Aug, lyric.co.uk.
