Why Gary Barlow’s Calendar Girls will be keeping their clothes ON
POP legend Gary Barlow and writer Tim Firth have been collaborating on a musical about the Yorkshire women behind the famous nude Women’s Institute calendar for four years. And it’s finally about to be unveiled. Well, partially.
The pair, both of whom attended Frodsham High School in East Yorkshire, played me three of the numbers they’ve written for The Girls, a reinterpretation of the film and stage show Calendar Girls, both written by Firth.
The initial idea had been to write big witty numbers for (as Firth put it) ‘women of a certain age’. Later, they realised that a re- set of Calendar Girls would be the ideal platform for these songs.
Firth would give Barlow fragments of an idea, or a bit of lyric or a title, and tell him to ‘just write what’s in your heart’. The result is some of the most heartfelt — and funny — songs I’ve heard in a long time.
Firth says it’s a show about life in a small town — ‘a village green that spoke to the world’.
Appropriately, a workshop of The Girls is being performed at a village hall in the Yorkshire Dales later this month, with Debbie Chazen, Sally Dexter, Michelle Dotrice, Rachel Lumberg, Claire Moore, Joanna Riding and Harriet Thorpe.
I didn’t like to lower the tone, but I did ask if the ladies would be keeping their clothes on for the workshop. Producer David Pugh responded: ‘If it had been August, they’d have been out there! But it’s a mini- concert format, so the clothes are staying on.’