It’s an odd hybrid, part musical, part soap opera. Weaving domestic incident around the history of Sheffield’s Brutalist landmark, the Park Hill estate, this Olivier-winning show — first staged at the city’s Crucible Theatre in 2019 and revived there to great acclaim in 2022 — is a sincere if uneven love letter to the power of community.
After a run at the National last year, Robert Hastie’s production has now settled into a new home in the West End. Jarvis Cocker, one of Sheffield’s most famous sons, was in the audience on press night. The common people, subject of his classic song, were out in force on the stage.
In a way, the show is the blue-collar equivalent of Plaza Suite, the venerable Neil Simon comedy currently being revived at the Savoy.
Where Simon builds an evening’s entertainment from three separate playlets, all set in the same hotel room, Chris Bush, writer of Standing at the Sky’s Edge, has devised a series of interwoven vignettes set in the same flat but separated by decades.
The narrative opens at the dawn of the 1960s, when Park Hill was the pristine symbol of a modernist future, and moves back and forth until it reaches the 21st century, when, after a long period of neglect, the “man-made monolith” was redeveloped as a gentrified enclave. Characters from different eras rub shoulders, delivering songs drawn from the back catalogue of the Sheffield singer-songwriter Richard Hawley.
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There’s certainly no shortage of passion in the performances, even if the script sometimes resembles a conscientiously assembled checklist of social issues. Laura Pitt-Pulford gives the stand-out vocal display as Poppy, a middle-class Londoner who has fled north after breaking up with her laddish fiancé. Elizabeth Ayodele impresses too as Joy, a young Liberian girl trying to build a new life on the concrete walkways.
As the Dawn Breaks strikes a gently pastoral note as the characters assemble on Ben Stones’s high-rise set, which looks more intimate in the Gillian Lynne than it did at the South Bank.
If there’s a problem with many of the other polished songs, it’s that they sometimes seem to have been inserted into the action almost at random. As much as you admire the musicianship of the band, tucked away on the first and second floors, you are often left wondering how exactly the numbers move the story on.
An awful lot of incident is crammed into a confusing final quarter.
Bush is less than subtle, too, when it comes to explaining how the advent of Thatcherism affected the local community. There’s a Storm a Comin’ is the cue for a contrived outbreak of mass mayhem.
★★★☆☆
To August 3, skysedgemusical.com
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