Lowry, Salford – until 28 July 2018
Reviewed by Lottie Davis Brown
5*****
March 2019 will mark the tenth anniversary of the tragic death of 60’s legend Dusty Springfield – another international icon gone far too soon.
I may not have been around in the sixties but I remember my parents playing Springfield’s records in the eighties and me then being able to spot her on TV in 1987 when she featured on the hit single What Have I Done To Deserve This? with the Pet Shop Boys which became a favourite song of mine for decades to come.
Johnathan Harvey’s musical adaptation of the life and biography of Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien aka Dusty Springfield as she was professionally known as (afterall, even on a 12” record it would be difficult to squeeze her full real name on!) opens not at the birth of Dusty, but at the start of her solo career in the Sixties, following her departure from pop-folk trio The Springfields (with her brother Tom Springfield and Tim Field) stating that she wanted to explore other types of music than folk. It’s 1963 and Dusty is about to launch her solo career with I Only Wanna Be With You on TV’s “Ready, Steady, Go”, however she suffers terribly with stage fright and as the audience early count down to her debut solo performance, Dusty is nowhere to be seen – she’s hiding out in the bathroom and has to be calmed down and pursuaded to go on stage by her two best friends Pat (Esther Coles) and Ruby (Ella Kenion) to perform.
Having had a strict Catholic upbringing, witnessing the constant bickering of her parents (which drove Dusty to outburst of anger and self harm) and being a self-confessed perfectionist, even when her records were at the top of the charts, Dusty was filled with self-loathing and doubt, aspiring to be like Mowtown sensations such as Aretha Franklin and never feeling she was quite good enough. This was only made worse by her mothers constant digs at her. However by 1965, Dusty was the best selling female singer with international success and soon embraced on a tour, where she was went down in history for refusing to sing in front of a segregated audience, resulting on being asked to leave that country.
Katherine Kingsley captures the sultry vocals, peroxide beehive and kohl-eyed persona of Springfield with ease, showing the “behind-the-scenes” less-seen side of Dusty – the insecure, perfection driven icon who soon became addicted to drugs and alcohol, being at the brink of self-destruction until the opportunity to reboot her career in the late 1980’s when following Pat and Kay going grovelling to her old manager Billings (Rufus Hound) which led to the recording with the Pet Shop Boys. Whilst act one is centred around her rise to fame as an international solo artist, act two shows the steady decline of her long term relationship with Lois (Joanna Francis), the impact this had on her drink and drugs addiction and her music career hiatus and leads up to her tragic death from breast cancer in early 1999.
The stage set, along with the lighting and video production take the audience through the swinging psychedelic Sixties London to the groovy “free love” Seventies, electro Eighties (with a fabulous homage to the PSB and Dusty collaboration of What Have I Done To Deserve This? in a mock electro discotheque-esque music video (which took me back to my childhood era and first memories of Dusty in the charts – which reached no.2 in the UK charts to the nineties with ease, so much so the show really did feel as if one was watching a television documentary of old Dusty footage to mark her career, even the funeral recordings from 1999 were played on video screens as the audience shed several tears as Kingsley gave a moving performance of Dusty’s final hour, surrounded by friends Pat, Ruby and ex-lover Lois.
A full standing ovation with raucous applause soon followed. Dusty Springfield may be gone but she certainly isn’t going to be forgotten in a hurry. Although the production features some darker moments, the wit is fast-flowing and there’s plenty of laugh out loud moments. There is literally nothing I can fault on this production.