It is easy to decry jukebox musicals, but almost all of them at least have a narrative, however thin or however bald a pretext for the numbers themselves. In 2009, Thriller – Live came into the West End, resolved to dispense with such needless fripperies as anything, you know, theatrical in a theatre. It has yet to be dislodged, and now a couple of hundred yards away it is joined by another “theatrical [ha!] concert”, the Beatles tribute Let It Be, originally titled Rain when it opened on Broadway in 2010 and directed by that band’s “Paul McCartney” (although they take pains not to use the actual Beatles’ names), Joey Curatolo.
    
The contradictions and absurdities are legion, beginning with the slogan outside the theatre exhorting us to experience “The Beatles live”. The programme boasts “All music in the production is played and sung live by the company”, which is apparently belied by the opening notes of the second of the 30-odd numbers, as none of the four moptops onstage is playing the mouth-harp intro we hear to “Please Please Me”. Even when keyboardist and general sound-thickening factotum Ryan Alex Farmery is allowed to become visible (after also supplying strings to “Yesterday” and so forth), the boast of live “authenticity” becomes ridiculous. More than half the show dates from the period after The Beatles’ last live concert in 1966; what’s the point of a “faithful” live rendition of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, which is famously one of the greatest studio-assembled tape montages in musical history? Instead of Farmery, what the show should include is a George Martin lookalike off at one side of the stage working a mixing console. On a more banal level, it proves amusing that Stephen Hill’s “George Harrison” resembles at various points Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and 1970s comedian Bob Carolgees, while drummer Gordon Elsmore takes on a likeness to his counterpart Barry Wom from parody band the Rutles. (The show has a pool of performers: two of each Beatle plus a few spares.)
    
Musically they are, it must be admitted, immensely skilled as they recreate sequences broadly describable as “moptops”, “Shea Stadium”, “Sgt Pepper” and “Abbey Road” (complete with barefoot Paul). Hill is not only a fine Harrison, but impressively reproduces Eric Clapton’s guitar part on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”; Elsmore even manages to play the backwards hi-hat cymbal on “Strawberry Fields”. If Reuven Gershon’s John sounds more Brummie than Liverpudlian when he speaks, one can forgive it. And the final encore is, as is now obligatory at every public event in this country, “Hey Jude”.
    
But the show remains utterly pointless as theatre. After half an hour or so of growing increasingly annoyed at the incessant chatter of a couple of women sitting near me, I realised that there was no real reason why they needed to shut up; they were not interfering with anything more than transient filler music. For half the cost of a top-price ticket for this show you could own the “red” and “blue” compilation albums, which were once considered notoriously overpriced. The Clash were wrong; phoney Beatlemania has not yet bitten the dust. In terms of the West End’s theatres this is, quite literally, a waste of space.
     
Written for the Financial Times.