Take That’s soundtrack to friendship
Tim Firth, writer of a musical featuring the songs of Take That, talks to Barry Egan about how the play is about female friendship
FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Gary Barlow entered a BBC songwriting competition called A Song for Christmas with a Barry Manilow-influenced rendition of Let’s Pray for Christmas. Nineteen-year-old Tim Firth was one of the judges on it. They got talking afterwards and realised they both came from the same small market town of Frodsham, in Cheshire.
Tim can recall talking to Gary, with the future Take That superstar drawing him a map of where his house was and discovering that they grew up just down the road from each other. They have been friends ever since.
In 2016, they joined forces and collaborated on a new musical version of screenwriter Firth’s 2003 film Calendar Girls. (Tim won the Olivier Award and UK Theatre Award for Best New Musical and the British Comedy Awards Best Comedy Film for Calendar Girls.)
Coming soon to Dublin’s Bord Gais Energy Theatre, The Band, featuring the music of Take That, is a tale of five friendships.
Those five friendships are not the members of Take That, primarily because The Band is not the story of Take That.
It is the tale of five young fans and how they met up again 25 years later after attending a Take That concert as teenagers in 1992.
It is tale of female friendship and solidarity and how pop music — beautiful uncynical inter-generational pop music — binds them together in so many different ways. It is a story almost about the ritual of remembrance and gratitude for five lives shared, assisted by a boyband with songs that changed their lives forever.
As Peter Robinson wrote in his review of The Band in The Guardian last year: “The story’s lead characters won’t astonish anyone who’s encountered Shirley Valentine or Muriel’s Wedding, and in less sensitive hands this could have been a messy attempt at mansplaining fandom. But Tim Firth’s writing radiates warmth, and beyond grandly staged set-pieces there’s also a strong, likeable attention to detail: early on we see a box of breakfast cereal styled on Take That’s real Kellogg’s Corn Pops promotion from the early 1990s, and later the boyband subtly recreate the sleeve of Progress, a more recent Take That album.
“Shows like this are notorious for crowbarring in hits on the most tenuous plot points,” added Robinson. “The band’s premise — that pop is all around us, and sometimes makes sense in unexpected ways — allows Tim Firth to leave his crowbar at home and have some fun. During an intense post-gig bonding session high above the lights of Manchester, the teenage friends decide only one thing can make the moment more perfect. ‘Let’s sing a song from the gig’, suggests one. ‘Have the boys got a song that’s right for moments like this?’ ponders another. The third is rather blunt: ‘No.’”
“Music is like a time tunnel,” says Firth of The Band. “It can bring you from the present to the past. It has that magic. It is about five friends whose lives have been defined in a sense by the songs they love. It is an incredibly powerful show about the power and the connection that music, and Take That, has on people and their lives.
“And the surprise with The Band is that it is not about Take That. It is about five women. It is a show for everyone.”
The aforementioned Take That have given their seal of approval to the show (the winners of the BBC talent programme Let It Shine, Five To Five, play the boyband in The Band) and indeed are credited as co-producers. “We are incredibly proud and excited that our first production as theatre producers is The Band — a musical that we think will touch the hearts of not just our fans, but everyone.”
Could it be magic?
‘It is about five women. It is a show for everyone’
‘The Band’ is at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre from November 6-10.