Could it be magic on tour?
Tim Firth talks to Diane Parks about Take That musical
TAKE That show The Band is the fastest selling musical tour on record. Within the first two hours, the box office had taken £2 million on a tour lasting seven months. And yet the musical nearly didn’t happen.
Writer Tim Firth and Take That songwriter Gary Barlow met as youngsters when they were both involved in the television talent show Song for Christmas and struck up a friendship.
The two went on to build successful but separate careers – Tim writing plays and screenplays for films including Calendar Girls, Kinky Boots and Confessions of a Shopaholic and Gary hitting stardom with boy band Take That. So when Gary was looking for someone to write a musical about Take That, Tim was the obvious choice.
But the problem was that Tim said no!
“After Take That had finished, so about 15 years ago, Gary said ‘do you think there’s a musical in here?’ I had just written the musical Our House with Madness and I said that was the only one I would ever do like that and I couldn’t see a way of making one from Take That’s catalogue of work,” recalls Tim, believing that was the end of the matter. Gary and Tim
did, however, work together on the stage show Calendar Girls, based on the story of a Yorkshire Women’s Institute group who stripped off for a fundraising calendar. And the idea of a Take That musical didn’t go away.
There was certainly material in the Take That saga. Formed in 1990 after auditions to be the UK version of New Kids on the Block, Take That was the archetypal boy band. Featuring singersongwriter Gary Barlow, Robbie Williams, Jason Orange, Howard Donald and Mark Owen, most of the band were teenagers.
By the mid-Nineties, they were chart-toppers, followed by millions of adoring fans. But they were soon splintering and in 1996 announced they were splitting. After a decade of reunions and separations the band now features three of the original members – Gary, Howard and Mark.
“Towards the end of our working on Calendar Girls the BBC approached Gary with the idea of a Saturday even- ing talent show,” says Tim. “In that conversation Gary mentioned that he had always wanted to do a Take That musical but hadn’t come up with a way to do it. They leapt on it so he came back to me and said ‘what do you think?” But Tim was still resistant. “I said ‘you’re crazy, it’s never going to work, you will not find five guys who can sing, dance and act well enough to front up a show about you’.”
But something in the discussion had sparked an interest in Tim’s mind.
“I still wasn’t thinking of doing it at this time but then I was driving home and thinking about it and I thought ‘what if the five guys had a completely different role in the show and weren’t driving the show? What if the story was actually about women and their love of a band?’ And suddenly this other story began emerging out of the mist…
“So the story would be about the recipients of the band and their music and the band wouldn’t be at the forefront,” says Tim. “This gave a really different way of creating a musical, using a back catalogue of music in a way it had never been used before.
“So I said ‘there may be a way into this – give me a couple of months’.”
In just six weeks Tim had written the musical which went on to become The Band. Instead of creating a narrative around the rise, break-up and re-forming of Take That, Tim left their story aside and put their fans at centre stage. Focussing on the relationship between a group of teenage girls for whom the band is everything, the girls reunite as adults after 25 years apart and decide to fulfil their dream of meeting the boy band whose music has been the soundtrack of their lives.
Tim believed he had the making of a successful show – now he just had to convince Take That!
“None of the band were expecting that,” he recalls. “I think at that stage they were expecting some kind of biopic. But, together with the producers, David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers, we deliberately didn’t go into great detail with Gary, Howard or Mark, who were the ones mainly involved. We just staged a reading. We got some actors in and worked on it for four days and called the guys in on the last day and just said ‘sit down, this is the potential musical!”
What’s more the final musical, The Band, doesn’t even include Take That or any of the band members’ names!
“The story was very sure of which direction it wanted to go and I was very certain that any mention of the name of the band or the names of the boys was wrong,” says Tim. “The band are never mentioned in the show, they are more metaphorical, but you just know who it’s about.
“The girls are so close to the band that they never refer to them as Take That, they always refer to them as ‘the boys’. Even the ‘band’ of the title doesn’t refer to the band Take That, it refers to friendship bands the girls bought at a gig when they bunked off at 16 to see the gig – that’s the thing that unites them.”
But, despite the story being unexpected, the Take That trio were convinced they had a potential hit on their hands.
“After seeing it I think they were just in a state of shock but they were incredibly moved by the show,” recalls Tim. “They were surprised by what it was about but could see that it worked.”
This then led to the television talent show Let It Shine to find the five singers to star in the tour – AJ Bentley, Nick Carsberg, Curtis T Johns, Yazdan Qafouri and Sario Solomon, collectively known as Five to Five.
Premiered in Manchester in September, the musical has gone on to be a huge hit. Currently on tour across the UK, it comes to Birmingham Hippodrome from May 1-12, plays the West End over Christmas and continues to tour until next March.
The Band may not mention Take That but it’s packed full of their hits including Shine, A Million Love Songs, Rule the World, Never Forget, Back for Good and Relight my Fire. But Tim was determined that the songs would not determine the story.
“The creative decision was that the lyrics of each song aren’t straining to be relevant to the story at any time,” says Tim. “The ambition was that the songs would appear in the lives of the characters as they would appear in their lives so for example on the radio or at a gig – always in the background of their lives.
“But the weird thing is that as soon as you make the decision that the songs don’t need to be relevant then somehow the songs achieve a strange and unexpected relevance – even though they were about completely different things. So for example, in this story, songs which were love songs became songs about the loss of love or the inability to achieve love. They became owned by the story.
“In a way that is what makes music unique – any song which is written is co-owned by the people who write it and the person who hears it because any song absorbs what is going on in the lives of the people who hear it at the time.
“I actually said to Gary and the boys really early on that there is a world where you could take the Take That songs out of the show and do it about Sting or The Beatles, in fact about anybody who has a big catalogue of music over a period of time because it’s not to do with the importance of the songwriter, it’s to do with the importance of the song and the power of these songs for people who have these songs as pivotal in their lives. It’s the background to their lives.”
Despite featuring songs from one of the top boy bands and tying in with a television series, Tim says he has been surprised by the huge success of The Band.
“Theatre can be very unpredictable and even though Take That have a huge fan base that isn’t enough to make a show work. A show has to appeal to people who just like to go and see musicals.
“I think it was a surprise to us how quickly word of mouth helped the show. Fans who went at the beginning have really helped spread the word because people know now there’s something different about this show.
“They went initially thinking it would just be about Take That but then they saw from the very first moment that it’s not about a band – it’s about them and their lives. I think that’s why it has been so successful.”
The Band plays the Theatre Royal in Nottingham from June 12 to 23.