Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast:  Alex Beaumont, Alan Howell, Elizabeth Carter, Laura Sillett, David Luke, Anna Campkin, Will Tierney, Michael Kantola, Sheridan Lloyd, Mike Slander, Daniel O’ Flanagan, Joseph Hardy, Josh Tye, Chloe Edwards-Wood.

The music world can be a cruel mistress, especially when you have had one hit record and the path is opened up before you as if the parting of the Red Sea has happened before your eyes and Moses is on the other side showing you this week’s sales and a mouthing over the crashing tumbling waves around you that Sir Paul McCartney has expressed an interest in doing a duet, with the fickle nature that comes in the form of a scratched record, dreams can be broken and dashed upon a cruel sea.

That path though, like the sea that swallowed whole vast swathes of the Egyptian army as they raced across the sand, has a limited shelf life if not nurtured or advised properly. For Laura and Bobby, the young stars that had a hit record with the song Dreamboats and Petticoats, the future has a rude awakening as the moment that British pop music and the life altering view of the nation’s young threatened to overtake the pair and see them become a defining example of the one hit wonder.

Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s follow up to the hugely enjoyable Dreamboats and Petticoats, the aptly fashionable titled Dreamboats and Miniskirts, revisits the pair not long after the number one record and the fall outs and recriminations over behaviour, expectations and 60s teenage angst play themselves out against a back drop of songs that made the early part of that decade awash with music that grabbed the soul and set the high standard for other eras to come.

To come of age is the point, it is the realisation that the world is a whole lot bigger than you imagine in early youth and for Laura and Bobby, like Britain was waking up to a new dawn as the post war children finally saw that to be part of the status quo was not a done and dusted option.

The only problem with coming of age is that it can make what went before seem so much more tantalising and whereas Dreamboats and Petticoats was a superb evening out, one which set toes tapping, eye-lashes flashing and the heart grooving, aside from the music, the follow-up was lacking in parts in what should have been just as a tremendous night out.

Once again there was no faulting the extremely beautiful vocal talents of Elizabeth Carter as Laura and the well placed Alan Howell appearing on the night as Norman but it was to the music that really captured the mood above the story line and the feeling of flatness that was being felt. With renditions of Do You Love Me, Twist and Shout, the utterly compelling You Don’t Own Me and the heartbreaking beauty of Oh Pretty Woman making an appearance in the show, the audience was left with much to sing about at least.

Fashions change and new styles are always coming into vogue but sometimes a new twist to an old favourite doesn’t quite live up to the pomp and greatness of before.

Ian D. Hall