Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Scotland Road is one of the most iconic and celebrated roads in Liverpool, it has been home to a community who have looked at its heyday with a certain fondness and others have looked at it with begrudging respect that it held so many people together despite any backlash from other areas that ran it down. People have lived there; worked there and grown up there, it is only right that eventually a musical would be based on Scotty Road.

Scotty Road- The Musical is the brain child of Gillian Hardie and Keddy Sutton and as part of the Homotopia Festival, these two women have been given carte blanche to send up some of the best and worst of television drama and an award winning musical in pursuit of belly aching inducing laughter. It is a plan that worked so very well and had the audience in the Unity Theatre gasping for breath and spluttering into well hidden handkerchiefs at some of the musical numbers and laughter inducing jokes the two actors, in the guise of the fun loving, Primark wearing alter egos Caz and Britney weaved into 80 minutes.

After being released from prison for the misdemeanour of planting a one pound ring squarely up the nose of someone who managed to cross them, the two Scotland Road residents regaled the audience of their time in prison via songs that didn’t quite make the cut of the film, Chicago…or if Chicago had been filmed in Liverpool. Cell Block Tango will never be seen in the same way again and the imagery of the television programme Prisoner Cell Block H will be forever consigned to the forget bin as there are two new queen bees in charge.

Keddy Sutton once again proves that she is one of the funniest female actors in Liverpool; her sense of timing is only surpassed by her ability to raise a smile no matter what the circumstances. Whether she is wearing a male appendage in ancient Greece or wearing Ugg boots and singing the praises of a Greg’s Pastie on the Scotland Road, no matter the situation she raises the game and raises the laughter in any crowd.  There certainly aren’t that many people that can carry off doing the voice of Judy Garland’s Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in a play about Liverpool.

The unique comic bond between the two women on stage was pure elation, with both giving their all, and then some, for the chance to make sure that the audience left with a huge smile on their faces.

One of those moments in theatre that you just wish they would record and put on television so that other parts of the U.K. could actually see why Liverpool is considered the city of laughter.

Ian D. Hall