Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, ✪✪✪✪

It’s become a familiar scenario, in British and American musical theatre; the show - from La Cage Aux Folles to Priscilla Queen Of The Desert - that both asserts the right to disrupt traditional gender norms, and exploits the huge traditional power of drag performance to create theatrical spectacle. It’s rare, though, to see the theme explored from such a down-to-earth, workingclass British perspective as in Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom Macrae’s no-holdsbarred musical, first seen in Sheffield in 2017, and based on a true-life story featured in a 2011 television documentary.

In essence, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is about a teenage-boy, in a northern english town, who just knows that he wants to be a drag queen, and whose loving single mum Margaret has brought him up to have confidence in himself exactly as he is. Jamie’s refusal to comply with macho norms causes problems at school, on the street, and with his bigoted estranged Dad; and all of this is charted through a terrific series of songs, ranging from classroom company numbers Work Of Art and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, to Margaret’s show-stopping mother-love anthem, He’s My Boy.

In this UK touring production, Layton Williams is a slightly subdued but appealing Jamie, Amy Ellen Richardson a superb Margaret; and with a fine twenty-strong cast throwing themselves passionately into the spirit of the story, and some sparkling choreography by Kate Prince to drive the show along, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie glitters its way to a happy ending that’s both satisfying, and subtle enough to suggest that Jamie’s story is only just beginning.

● Next at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 28 April-2 May, and King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 8-13 June.