By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN? Saturday 30 August, runs through 22 November 2025

RUNTIME: 195 minutes (including 15-minute interval)

Can you ever have too much of a good thing?

• Read on for reasons including how this is a classy production we’re unsure will repeat its Tonys success at the Oliviers

With its 5 2024 Tony wins, this play with music rumoured to be inspired by Fleetwood Mac and about a band on the cusp of superstardom including 2 couples, 1 British and 1 American, breaking up under the pressure of an interminable recording process looks promising.

We’d heard the music in advance by Will Butler of Arcade Fire and it’s strong enough to merit a place on hit Mac albums including Rumours, Tusk and Tango In The Night.

It opened in the UK back in May and the reason we haven’t seen it until now is because its 195-minute runtime including interval is notoriously hard to justify.

We do think it’s half an hour too long and appreciate that when 1 of your themes is the tedium and exhaustion of a prolonged recording process there is merit in reinforcing that with your audience.

However we felt the interminability of some of the circular conversations could have been curtailed not least to give more attention to the original songs which we felt deserved more of the spotlight than they received here.

You join us in the mid 70s where the band have enjoyed unexpected chart success and their record company has just tripled the size of their recording budget to a figure even beyond that of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.

The cast is excellent and we particularly enjoyed Jack Riddiford (Romeo And Juliet, Almeida) as the perfectionist yet bullying lead singer, the lacking in confidence star played by Lucy Karczewski, making her West End debut, and the equally talented ‘shy little girl’ keyboardist given life by Nia Towle.

Plays with music about the creative process are not notorious crowdpleasers which is the reason why this blog has the title it does with an emphasis on the ‘gigz’.

It’s also why we would’ve preferred less dwelling on the studio spark of creativity and would have opened the action out into a gig setting at some point to better involve the live audience.

It’s a classy production which is set beautifully but we’re unsure whether it will repeat its Tonys success at next year’s Olivier Awards.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Marc Brenner and Stereophonic Tickets
• Have you seen a Duke Of York’s show before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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