Sister Act
Music: Alan Menken Lyrics: Glenn Slater Book: Cheri and Bill Steinkellner Director: Craig Revel Horwood
On tour throughout the UK See www.sisteractuktour.co.uk for details
Running time: 2hrs 40mins (including interval)
It’s only four years since the first UK stage tour of Sister Act came to an end, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. But this superb all-new revival, directed and choreographed by Craig Revel Horwood, more than deserves to pull in the punters: “it won’t save your soul but it will make you feel great”. The plot is, of course, “ludicrous”. After witnessing a gangland killing, a brassy black soul singer, Deloris Van Cartier, is given witness protection in a (mostly white) convent – and turns the tone-deaf nuns into disco divas. But what the material lacks in substance, it makes up for with “surreal energy” and infectious, exuberant music. And in this production – which began its life at the Leicester Curve and is playing large venues across the UK for the next year – there’s a must-see lead performance from Alexandra Burke, whose “oaked, sinewy” voice “ripples and soars like a creature rising from the deep”.
It’s a “whirlwind” of a performance, agreed Pat Ashworth in The Stage. It’s “big, bold and sassy”, and the richness and range of Burke’s voice is “matched by a deliciously dry delivery and comic timing”. Revel Horwood’s other casting coup has been to give almost all the roles to “terrifically talented” actor-musicians, said Georgina Brown in The Mail on Sunday. It seems that if you put “a saxophone, a violin, a trumpet or an accordion in the blessed hands of a stage nun”, instead of being a “camp musical cliché she becomes a sweet swinging sister, effortlessly bringing out the gospel and the soul – as well as the 1970s disco, funk and the sheer fun – in composer Alan Menken’s original tunes”. The result is that the show has a kind of “holy wholesomeness” that was missing in the “coarse, brash” original production seen some years ago at the London Palladium.
Sorry, but what’s missing here is Whoopi Goldberg, said Sam Marlowe in The Times. Alexandra Burke is “perfectly competent”, but without a personality on stage big enough to fill Goldberg’s shoes, this “glitterball of a show seems pretty hollow”.