And so – hot on the heels of Mamma Mia, We Will Rock You, Tonight's the Night, Our House, Jersey Boys, All Shook Up and many dozens more – here arrives yet another jukebox musical, this time with music courtesy of UB40, whose biggest hits include Red Red Wine and Can't Help Falling in Love. Despite the critical stigma that's often attached to these musicals – with their structures intent on incorporating dozens of hits - here's a show which actually tries to reinvent the genre by having a more book-focused show and just fourteen songs.
The musical examines the lives of the underground creatures who dominate city centre nightlife. With many different storylines casually intertwined the main focus is on Rudie, a homeless eighteen-year-old whose heroin-addict boyfriend goes missing one night. Promises and Lies is very much an 'issues' based play - with prostitution, drug addiction, gun crime, mugging and murder all centre-stage subjects – but the crucial question that must be instantly addressed with jukebox musicals is how the music is incorporated, and whether it's appropriately used.
And that – unfortunately – is where it sadly goes downhill. Reggae music and gritty new writing are two theatrical elements that simply do not mix in this production. Promises and Lies has the potential to make a good two-hour play about city life in Britain today, but with regular interventions of percussion, trumpets and saxophones, it just falls mighty flat. Long scenes of high-octane dramatic shouting are rudely punctured by UB40's songs, which then alter the dynamic of the scenes for the worse. It's not a comfortable combination, and coupled with a terrible sound design it just doesn't work. For a contemporary play the music is too dated. It's glaringly obvious that this wasn't a musical written from scratch, but one with pre-existing material jarringly shoved in.
Despite the musical criticism, there's a distinctively urban, modern feel in both Jess Walters' writing – which is very soap-opera driven - and the visual images created by Simon Higlett's wonderful set and costumes, which brilliantly depict the essence of our generic city centre creatures; chavs and all. There's been much media attention about the way our shopping districts are becoming too similar; the attraction of Promises and Lies is that this could be any city in any part of the UK. The problem with this is that it's not grounded enough in a sense of location; the accents vary from region to region, and when it's quite clearly set in Birmingham, I just wish the two directors had made it more blatant.
