John Byrne shouldn't be a playwright you affiliate with jukebox musicals. The Slab Boys writer – who, as a painter, is being celebrated in a retrospective at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove – has all the time had the favored contact. In his TV collection Tutti Frutti and Your Cheatin’ Coronary heart, he additionally made a lot of his love of well-liked music. However he has by no means earlier than positioned music as centrally as it's in Underwood Lane.
Andy Arnold’s full-throttle manufacturing shouldn't be billed as such, however the jukebox musical is the shape it most carefully resembles. It isn't solely that it takes its identify from the Paisley avenue the place Byrne’s teenage pal Gerry Rafferty grew up earlier than he discovered fame with Baker Road and Caught within the Center With You. It is usually that, in its breezy story of a 60s skiffle band skirting around the fringes of the massive time, it has the identical flippantly plotted air as many a singalong crowdpleaser.
Greater than that, it has the songs. The important thing pleasure in Underwood Lane is within the interval hits. Given appropriately spare and rugged preparations by Hilary Brooks, they draw on that harmless interval when Tin Pan Alley was fusing into rock’n’roll.
If Three Steps to Heaven and That’s Amore go down nicely within the first half, Will You Nonetheless Love Me Tomorrow, You’ve Misplaced That Lovin’ Feelin’ and I’ve Been Loving You Too Lengthy are back-to-back highlights after the interval. The actor-musicians journey the melodies with a pure coronary heart, their harmonies candy and their taking part in crisp.
That emotional enter is simply what is required to offset a script that glides over its weightier themes. Take Marc McMillan as Dessie Devlin, the band’s most formidable member. He has solely the skimpiest of dialogue to assist him via two funerals, a romantic cut up and the loss of a kid. He does nicely, however Byrne’s black humour can appear underwritten, whereas his intriguing theme in regards to the postwar mixture of Catholics and Protestants in west-coast Scotland stays largely latent.
The manufacturing does, although, have humorous turns to match the various humorous strains – be it Simon Donaldson as a thuggish roadie or George Drennan as a foul-mouthed priest – including as much as a slight however cheerful summer time leisure.
At Johnstone city corridor till 9 July, then on the Tron theatre, Glasgow, 14–30 July.
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