Plymouth Theatre Review

Title of Show: Vanities

Date of Attendance: 16/05/2024

Venue: Devonport Playhouse

Production Type: Musical

Easy to Follow: 3/5

Family Friendly: 2/5

Must See: 5/5

Admittedly, like many others in the audience, I’d never heard of the musical Vanities. So, when walking into the Playhouse I didn’t know what to expect. When not knowing about a show one can feel uneasy about the next couple of hours and whether it will be an enjoyable watch or an angsty look back and forth at your watch. When waiting for the show to begin two things occurred to me that made me feel like I was in safe hands. The first being the long line of students in the row in front of me wearing “The Actor’s Wheel” hoodies. Being familiar with Marjon’s Actor’s Wheel for many years and having been an avid watcher of their theatrical output, I knew immediately whatever was going to happen on that stage would be well rehearsed and performed. The second reason I could breathe a sigh of relief was looking at the set design.  A blessing (and a curse) with the Devonport Playhouse is having a lack of traditional curtains (as are equipped at many other venues) to hide sets and to create a barrier between audience and actors. Without that luxury, the small and minimalist set was laid bare for all to see and I could see that there was character and thought put into every detail. You were immediately asking questions: Why that colour? Why those lights? Why is that chair bare and others so furnished? Five minutes before beginners positions I could hear the wonderful front of house usher exclaim to another patron that they were going to need tissues – And they were right! 

There are only three actors (and characters) throughout the show, which shows the progression of three friends’ (Mary, Kirsty and Joanne’s) friendship, from Texan schoolyard to late adulthood. 

In hindsight, this was a perfect choice of production to showcase all three talents due to the fact that there were no principal part amongst the three. It was a true ensemble performance and the actors understood this from the get-go. Musicals can very easily fall into the trap of actors fudging their way through the action to get from song to song, but if there were no songs in this production it would have still been a terrific piece of theatre. You can very well believe that these people were friends on and off the stage, and it’s hard to talk about them individually because they worked so well as a cohesive unit. Having said that there was one person who stood out in this production and that was Jasmine Causley as Kathy. The ‘Cute Boys with Short Haircuts’ song was the highlight of the show. For me, this was the part of the production where we left musical comedy and the whole performance became something with more gravitas. Because I didn’t know the piece I immediately thought that the whole show must be a musical comedy, however it turned out to be much more than that. 

At the start it felt like I was watching a Disney Channel movie from twenty years ago, as some of the accents were a bit ropey, the characters seemed to be played vacuously andit felt as if this would be a ‘Boys and Slumber Parties’ kind of show, with the three characters only fixated on these two subjects, especially with one of the lines being “I just want to be pregnant and married” (The sort of phrase that would make a feminist want to burn the theatre down!) but when the turning point happened (the New York Apartment Scene) the story immediately took a much-needed darker and deeper turn, dealing with intense and complex subjects such as alcoholism, the menopause and death. Like most shows, there were jokes littered throughout the action but the thing that stood out to me was the impeccable comedic timing and delivery.

These subjects generated a wave of laughter throughout the audience and from this point the show could have gone in a very different direction, but for me what makes this a five-star show was that instead of playing up to the comedy and making the action more farcical to please the audience’s braying laughter, the actors respected their characters and their source material and played it exactly how it should be played. I could probably count on one hand the number of professional actors who can do that on stage. Thank you to Marjon and the Actors Wheel for showing just how this sort of show should be done. 

Seeing how these young actors understood the complexities of sustaining relationships with friends and lovers, and how they dealt with aging in such a mature, honest and refreshing way made me want to see this show again and again. This was some of the finest examples of acting I’ve seen in a long time! 

Review by Sam Crawley