Review: Save the Last Dance For Me, Orchard Theatre, Dartford, Tuesday, January 22

by Trevor Sturgess

If you enjoyed Dreamboats and Petticoats, you’ll love Bill Kenwright’s latest feast of musical nostalgia.

Save the Last Dance for Me is a feelgood 1960s pop party that gives oldies a chance to revisit their youth, and younger ones a way to discover a treasure trove of great numbers from rock and roll’s golden age.

But like Dreamboats, which originated at the Churchill, Bromley, the songs are wrapped in a story. Or, more precisely, the story is woven to fit the songs.

It may be slender but it’s credible and engaging. A script by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who met at a youth club in the early 1960s, taps their experience of what life was like for those baby boomers as they entered their hormone-driven teens.

Caravan holidays with parents, seaside fun with candy floss and kiss me quick hats, and the ever-present desire by teenagers to break away from mum and dad for some fun with the opposite sex.

But Save introduces a more audacious storyline which many parents might have frowned on at the time – a teenage schoolgirl falling for a black American airman while on holiday in Lowestoft.

The nearby US camp was an obvious attraction for British girls (Yanks were dubbed “oversexed, overpaid and over here”) and made the ideal venue for much of the music.

The holiday romance blossoms into so much more, provoking the sort of racial prejudice so prevalent in those days - but this is a happy musical and it turns out all right in the end,

The twists and turns of the romance add depth and emotion to a story that so well evokes the atmosphere of 50 years ago.

But, above all, this is a vehicle for hit songs, written by the talented team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman.

The heroine is called Marie and, hey, we hear Elvis’ No1 His Latest Flame ("Marie’s the name of..."). Teenager in Love, Be My Baby, Viva Las Vegas, And Then He Kissed Me, Suspicion, Surrender, Sweets for My Sweet, and of course the closing number Save the Last Dance for Me. The songs keep on coming, and the audience keep singing along.

For me, the standout was Hushabye, a little known do-wop number sung acapella by the finger-clicking company, with ice cream man Carlo (Alan Howell) leading on Frankie Lymon-style falsetto.

Elizabeth Carter moves on from Dreamboats to take the lead female role in Save, with Kieran McGinn playing the black airman Curtis. They make a good team.

The live band gives the production drive and an excuse for a dance in the aisles – if the Orchard’s aisles had been wide enough.

This production may be to a formula, but it is a winning one that had a delighted audience leaving the theatre humming those oh so familiar tunes of their yesteryears.

Save the Last Dance for Me runs at Dartford's Orchard Theatre until Saturday, January 26.

It visits Tunbridge Wells’ Assembly Hall Theatre from Monday, March 11, to Saturday, March 16.

See it at Canterbury’s Marlowe Theatre from Monday, May 20, to Saturday, May 25.