Dean Elliott and Hayley Berkley
in Buddy
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“I hope the music is enough,” says Buddy Holly, before he takes to the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theatre in Alan Janes and Rob Bettinson’s cursory packaging of his life and music—and the reply comes, “If it ain’t, you’re dead.” The Crickets had been signed to appear there on the mistaken assumption that they were black, and the nerdily bespectacled Holly was a white Texan. But he survives the gig, recreated here for the Act One curtain scene, and the music is enough to keep the pulse of this show beating too, in between clumsily orchestrated behind-the-scenes encounters in the radio stations and recording studios where his career was born.
But it’s Holly’s premature death—killed in a light plane crash in 1959, aged 22, as he travelled from the group concert that is recreated as the Act Two finale—that means this show both keeps him forever young and his memory alive.
Long before the current trend for jukebox musicals like Mamma Mia! and We Will Rock You that fold old pop repertoires into new stories, Buddy—which came in the wake of Alan Bleasdale’s 1985 Elvis play Are You Lonesome Tonight?—was part of a genre of biographical plays of pop stars that used their songs to illustrate the stories of their lives, continued now with the current Broadway hit about the Four Seasons, Jersey Boys, that is London-bound next year.
Dean Elliott in Buddy
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While Elvis’s life had a dramatic arc, Janes and Bettinson are hampered here by a life that was dramatic only for its sudden end, and their attempt to make a play out of it is mired in predictability and a lot of padding. As directed by Bettinson, the result doesn’t lack sincerity; the creators’ love of the man and the music comes shining through, but the characterisation is often as cardboard as Adrian Rees’ sets, which for most of the show is dominated by a painted flat of advertising hoardings with a small retro video screen at its centre for some bizarre shadow-play backstage scenes.
There isn’t quite enough, musically or dramatically, to sustain it, so other, non-Holly numbers are folded in, too, from Jack Daw (doing a cover of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”) to the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, the acts who shared the stage with Buddy at his final gig at Clear Lake, Iowa on 2 February, 1959, and the light aircraft that subsequently killed them all.
The patchwork result undoubtedly captures something of the musical excitement of a period that marked the birth of rock ‘n’ roll as it emerged, in Holly’s case, from a country and western background, and Bettinson’s production with its young cast brings an appropriate youth and vitality to the stage. Matthew Wycliffe, who graduated from Arts Ed only last year, shares the title role with Dean Elliott and gives an engagingly attractive performance. And long before British director John Doyle adopted the use of actor/musicians to play their own instruments,
Buddy had got there first, with Greg Last’s Joe and Nick Sayce’s Jerry stealing the musical honours as Holly’s double bass player and drummer respectively.
Originally premiered 18 years ago (with a different design) in the far larger Victoria Palace Theatre, and then moving to the Strand, the original production ran for some 12 years and was exported internationally, including a six-month Broadway run. Now shrink-wrapped to fit the tiny Duchess Theatre, one of the West End’s smallest theatres, Buddy Holly—who in September would have been celebrating his 71st birthday—lives on and will likely play on for several years to come.
Buddy
By Alan Janes and Rob Bettinson
Directed by Rob Bettinson
Duchess Theatre