HOW do you make holy water? Boil the hell out of it. Boom! Boom!
If you can take further punishment from the Little Sisters of Hoboken, New Jersey, they are putting the ho-ho into Hoboken tonight at Mount St Helen's School Chapel (here played by the former St Margaret's Church, in Walmgate).
Six all-singing, all-dancing sisters are mounting a musical charity benefit to bury the last four of their fellow 52 nuns killed by convent chef Sister Julia's vicious Vichyssoise (the sextet had a lucky escape down the bingo hall).
As you can gather, Dan Goggin and Steve Hayes's off-Broadway hit of the eighties is as daft as the Sister Act and Nuns On The Run movies with big, daft songs to boot, and if strained fun with nuns hasn't made you laugh previously, this show won't change that. However, plenty in Thursday's audience enjoyed the havoc in a habit.
Moira Murphy's Irish Mother Superior has a high old time on an accidental drug trip; Caroline Chambers's sweetly forgetful Sister Mary Amnesia forms a double act with her streetwise puppet, Sister Mary Annette; Jenny Cohen's Sister Myopia turns into a mad-as-bananas Carmen Miranda; Felicity Walsh's Sister Mary Leo sings ever so prettily of her love of lilacs; and Jill Pollard's Sister Robert Anne runs through her repertoire of wimple impersonations.
Unfortunately, the jaunty piano of musical director Paul Laidlaw is overpowering whenever they break into a dance. Without microphones, these sisters are doing it for themselves, too often leaving us nun the wiser about the lyrics.
This, however, cannot take away from the star performance of Anna Mitchelson's Sister Mary Hubert, whether tap-dancing or bringing this hit-and-miss variety show to an uplifting finale with the gospel belter Holier Than Thou.
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