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Fourteen years before ‘Orange Is the New Black’, ITV pre-empted our insatiable desire for women’s prison dramas with ‘Bad Girls’. When the show ended in 2006, its creators Ann McManus and Maureen Chadwick turned it into – what else? – a musical.
If the Union Theatre’s revival of the short-lived 2007 West End curio is anything to go by, doing time looks like a riot – in more ways than one. (Oh, except for the institutionalised abuse, casual rape and, bizarrely, the pernicious influence of the Freemasons, a sub-plot that’s thoroughly disregarded just as soon as it’s introduced).
The trouble is, serious themes are trivialised by silliness. The musical can’t settle on a tone, from misery to overt comedy, particularly from the two Julies (Jayne Ashley and Catherine Digges) – two prostitute best friends – who work brilliantly well together in their matching pinnies. But the plot is mostly about a prison guard who manipulates and rapes the most vulnerable inmates. The skin crawls a bit to see it dealt with in such a light-hearted way.
Among the huge cast – capably directed by Will Keith and cleverly choreographed by Jo McShane – there are some stunners and some stinkers. Dialogue suffers from woodenness and, a couple of performances aside, the diverse characters from the TV series just don’t have time to develop condensed into two and a half hours.
Still, it’s all too rare to see a 17-strong cast on stage only three of whom are men, in a musical written by three women. Sometimes dark, mostly daft, it wouldn’t be any great loss to see this musical banged up for a bit longer. And yet, despite all of this, there’s something strangely endearing about seeing a group of strong women sing their way to justice – a mildly uplifting triumph of unity over misogyny.