Hucknall's musical hits a High

PARENTAL ADVISORY WARNING: this blog may contain large quantities of Disney
At the end of a long week of arduous physical labour (all right, keyboard-bashing), I like nothing more than the ritual Friday night slob-out. You know the form – an artery-clogging take-away washed down by something reduced to £3.99. Real quality and sophistication, in other words.
But not last Friday. Oh no…
It started a few days ago with my wife offering me a tantalising alternative to the norm (steady on, not that tantalising): Spend your Friday night watching an amateur performance of Disney’s High School Musical!
Well, you can imagine how my heart leapt at the prospect. Y’see, with two young daughters, I’ve had Troy and Gabriella rammed down my earholes for what seems like a lifetime – squeaky clean American High School kids, flawless singing and choreography, and the usual guy-gets-the girl plot. To borrow a phrase from an appropriate idiom, waddeverrr…
Anyway, no Friday night take-away, no cheap plonk. Instead, a plastic seat in a school hall watching the finest talent Hucknall’s National School has to offer.
And do you know what? It was fine talent. I have in my life paid rather a lot of money to sit in some lavishly-trimmed London seats and been a little less whelmed than I was on Friday.
This had some genuinely spine-tingling voices (Fay Springthorpe, who played Gabriella, can Sing), some dominate-the-stage acting (take a bow Alice Ratcliffe, who played Ms Darbus), and some crowd-pleasing laughs (step forward Dominic ‘Dom Joly’ Johnson).
May be we didn’t get flawless, produced-to-perfection vocals (we did get some damn fine choreography, by the way), but so what? We got a Real McCoy high school musical where kids as young as 11 displayed an unvarnished exhuberance without the need for any of that cloying Disney gloss.
By the end, though, I didn’t know which way to look. On stage, there was a no-holds barred, hand-clapping encore. At the back of the hall, there were the teachers otherwise known as Miss Barrett, Miss Lenton and Miss Case putting on a display which told you that they should have been in the chorus line too.
Two performances for the price of one, you might say. And better value than a Friday night take-away…