BWW Reviews: SING SOMETHING SIMPLE, Cockpit Theatre, March 27 2013

Spencer Parkin can't sing - and, take it from someone who can't sing, he really can't sing. That might not be quite so bad were it not for the fact that his mother, brother and best friend can sing. And they want Spencer to sing too. And he's trying. But he's not really sure that he wants to sing - he'd rather everyone else sing and he just join in when he can. He wants to be accepted for what he is - a non-singer in a world full of singers, whom he loves and who love him. And Spencer has learning difficulties.

If you think that this summary makes Dark Horse's Sing Something Simple (at The Cockpit Theatre and on tour) sound like a worthy exploration of issues surrounding disability, you would be right. But only half-right, as it's also a comedy, a musical and a coming-of-age drama about talents developed and talents scorned. If the set changes are a bit clunky at times, well, there's a lot of half-remembered tunes playing while the furniture goes on and off and some cleverly photoshopped family snaps to look, explaining the backstories of this awkward foursome, pulling together and pulling apart at the same time - as old friends and families do.

Alywyne Taylor is splendid as Valerie, the tough love dispensing matriarch who still sings in Working Men's clubs and so, so, so wants her elder son Kit (Richard Maxted) to get the musical education she didn't and emulate his grandfather, a successful session musician from the 60s and 70s. Kit has other ideas. Both are good, but the two youngsters rather steal the show. Heather Dutton gives a wonderfully well-judged performance as big, busty Bonnie still running after the boy band looks of Kit, but slowly falling for the homely decency of Spencer. Joe Sproule, as the lead, connects instantly with the audience: literally when breaking the fourth wall to demand that we sing along to the old time easy-listening, cheesy classics that give the play its name; and theatrically when his charisma, warmth and anger give us an insight into his usually pent-up emotions. As the Paralympian athletes showed us last summer, with accomplished work like this, disability disappears and we're left to enjoy a superb performance.

Vanessa Brooks' writing has elements of the classic sitcom, elements of soap opera and elements of youth theatre about it and, if the end feels a little unsatisfactory, there's enough wit and poignancy to provide plenty of laugh out loud moments and a few of tear-pricking sadness. In the hands of a cast less skilled, less empathetic, less attuned to the play's largely unspoken tensions, Sing Something Simple might feel a little ordinary - with this cast, it's anything but.

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