It’s sheer bad luck for Memphis to open in the West End so close to The Scottsboro Boys. On its own terms, David Bryan and Joe DiPietro’s musical is a feelgood, affirmative blast; in any kind of context, however – such as the proximity of another show dealing with broadly the same subject – its picture of racism in the American South is glib and facile, with the strongest weapons against such prejudice being portrayed as love and music. As for that music, this is touted as a soul/R&B musical, but the (white) protagonist’s big this-is-who-I-am numbers are closer to AOR.
    
The story of Memphis DJ Huey Calhoun is loosely based on the real-life figure of Dewey Phillips. Both factual and fictional versions pioneer the playing of “race” music on white radio in the city in the 1950s; however, the stage character of Huey also has a love affair with a black singer, allowing the pair to encounter direct and violent bigotry (she gets the worst of it), to have something immediate to stand up against rather than an abstract, and to be rent apart when Huey refuses to be pasteurised for national TV consumption but stays in Memphis as Felicia moves north on a major recording contract. The heartwarming liberal defiance is as packaged as Huey supposedly isn’t. With crossover audience demographics no doubt in mind, the most persistent and obstinate example of prejudice we see is black-on-white, that of Felicia’s brother.
    
Soul queen Beverley Knight has first billing as Felicia, and rightly so given her magnificent voice, but the narrative focus is on Huey. Killian Donnelly has all the requisite energy and wackiness, but too much nose and 21st-century phrasing in his singing voice. All that said, the Memphis strain of soul is always a winner: brassier, more gospel-influenced yet… how to put this delicately?... stronger on the hips. Director Christopher Ashley and choreographer Sergio Trujillo try to put as much vigour and fun into the movement as there was in that other race-music-on-TV musical Hairspray at this address a few years ago, and there can never be such a thing as a bad show with the pocket rocket tiger-on-vaseline Jason Pennycooke in the cast, here playing sidekick Bobby. In the end, though, it’s a bit of a whitewash.
     
Written for the Financial Times.