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The Long-Lasting Appeal of Blood BrothersDateline: 22nd June, 2005It began as a commission for a five-actor strong YPT company, the Merseyside Young People's Theatre Company, and had its first performance at Fazakerly Comprehensive School in Liverpool in 1981. It lasted 70 minutes and had one song in it, the Marilyn Monroe theme. Immediately Willy Russell started working on a full musical version (to a certain amount of derision from his friends because he decided he would write the music himself), which played at the Liverpool Playhouse where it had a very successful twelve week run. Then it transferred to the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, on 11th April 1983. In spite of good public reaction and outstanding reviews, it was slow to take off and the theatre wasn't prepared to risk an extension, so it closed. The professional rights were released and many productions at home and abroad followed, and then Bill Kenwright took it up. He produced a national tour and persuaded Russell to allow another West End run, this time at the Albery in 1988. In 1991 it transferred to the larger Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Road and a Broadway production followed in 1993. It is still at the Phoenix, and it's still touring. Last night I saw it (again) at the Sunderland Empire, and (again) at the end the very mixed audience rose to its feet as one. My companion, who had never seen it before, was utterly entranced. So what is it that gives Blood Brothers is long-lasting appeal? There's no dance, no special effects (no chandeliers or helicopters!). It's not a epic story, like Les Miserables, nor does it have an epic background such as the Vietnam War in Miss Saigon. It is, quite simply, a domestic tragedy, and that is what makes it so popular. Think about Shakespeare. Most critics, actor and directors - most people involved in theatre - would probably cite King Lear as his greatest tragedy, but ask the ordinary person, who hasn't really studied Shakespeare, which of his tragedies (s)he'd rather see, and in nine cases out of ten the reply will be Romeo and Juliet. Why? because it is the one which is closest to their experience. Romeo and Juliet are two ordinary teenagers: they have a more immediate appeal than kings like Lear or Macbeth. And although most people will have experienced - or, at least, seen - jealousy like Othello's, he is a great hero, a leading man of the state, not an ordinary guy. Romeo and Juliet, however, are ordinary guys. The Johnstone family, Linda, Eddie and his parents: they are ordinary guys, too. This is a musical about ordinary guys with lives people can recognise as being like theirs, or at least like those of people they know. Think of the situations: husband abandons wife and kids; wife struggles to keep the family together; a mother's protectiveness for her children; one kid goes off the rails; brother is sucked into the off-the-rails kid's crime; teenage boy is scared by his own hormones; teenage relationships; teenage pregnancy; unemployment and the dole; uncaring bosses. These are situations to which ordinary people can relate, which resonate for them. And, as he has proved in numerous plays, Russell knows how to push the right emotional buttons, hovering on the edge of sentimentality but never actually crossing the line. It has been described as a melodrama, and so it is, but melodrama without the perjorative connotations. What is also interesting is that here is a musical in which there is not a single love song. Light Romance comes closest but not that close. On the contrary, most of the songs are about problems: Marilyn Monroe tells the story of Mrs Johnstone's marriage- and its break-up; Easy Terms is about living (and loving) on the "never-never"; Shoes upon the Table is about bad omens, and, of course, that most deeply moving one of them all, Tell Me It's Not True, is the plea of everyone faced with tragedy and loss. This is Russell's hallmark: his work is based on close observation of ordinary everyday life. Anyone who has ever been on a school trip will recognise great chunks of Our Day Out; the gulf between Rita and her family and the other one between her and Frank in Educating Rita ring many bells; how many women would love to do what Shirley Valentine did? The suffocating blanket that a family can become is well portrayed in Breezeblock Park and the view of marriage we get from Stags and Hens is bleak but, for many, accurate. We could, with justice, call Willy Russell the playwright of everyday life, and in Blood Brothers he unites plot, words and music so that they produce something really special. Let's leave the last word to Michael Billington, writing as the show arrived at the lyric from Liverpool: "(Blood Brothers) is brilliant melodrama. Indeed it owes less to the modern British musical than to The Corsican Brothers or The Force Of Destiny. But it is melodrama done with such power, such intense belief in itself and, above all, such a wealth of good music, that it carries one along with it in almost unreserved enjoyment."
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