FAME is an F word with a rude awakening in this American musical. While TV talent shows encourage wannabe starlets to crave the fast track to fame without the craft and the graft, Fame writers Steven Margoshes, Jacques Levy and Jose Fernandes prefer to espouse the virtues of hard work in the cautionary tale of Carmen Diaz, who wants the instant highs but finds them only in drugs instead.
This is not a pious piece, however, because Carmen's Icarus path to self-destruction is not the only journey we follow, but certainly Fame's mantra of hard work and more hard work chimes with the philosophy of Stage Experience director and choreographer Louise Denison.
Each summer, Louise and musical director Adam Laird pull together a show in under a fortnight in a summer school for blossoming theatre talents, and given Fame's themes, it is perfect material for the company of 60 assembled daily since July 22. "They don't have time to be lazy or to moan," Louise said the last time Stage Experience presented this show in 2009.
Charlotte McCamley's impressionable, irrepressible Serena Katz in Fame: The Musical. Picture: David Harrison
This summer, she is working with a particularly young company, but the same principles apply: discipline is all and the benefit will come out in the performance, not least in the 12-minute opening number, the ensemble routine Hard Work, that settles any first-night nerves with its combination of precision and vivacity on a crowded dancefloor, stairways and balcony above.
As in 2009, the production is set in current times, and not in the 1980s of the movie or TV series, pointing a mirror at today's ever-rising obsession with "fame" while emphasising the timeless characteristics of a theatre school: the hopes and fears, the camaraderie and clashes, the drama and romances, as the latest intake at New York’s High School of Performing Arts progresses from first audition to graduation.
Lydia Bradd, 20, from Calcutt, Knaresborough, brings the skills honed by her musical theatre and dance studies at the Urdang Academy to playing Carmen with a Latino swagger, but also vulnerability not too far beneath the surface bravado and brazen red dress. She dances with more energy than an electric storm and she sings In LA with all the pathos Carmen's diminishing circumstances demand.
Max factor: Max Mulrenan, centre, pulling out all the moves as Tyrone Jackson, performing Dancin' On The Sidewalk. Picture: David Harrison
Denison puts her faith entirely in young performers, even for the school teachers, from Alexandra Mather's English tutor Miss Sherman to James Bradshaw's music teacher Mr Sheinkopf.
Finn East's big puppy Joe Vegas and Charlotte McCamley's impressionable Serena Katz are bursting with exuberance, while Amelia Cook's sweet-toothed Mabel Washington is a comic joy, with a dynamite singing voice too on Mabel's Prayer. Luke Wilby's studious Nick Piazza and, in particular, Sam Rippon's charming composer Schlomo Metzenbaum provide understated contrast.
If ever a performance summed up the worth of Stage Experience, it is Max Mulrenan in the role of the ultra-talented, volatile, dyslexic Tyrone Jackson. In his fifth summer show and still only 14, he is sensationally good, be it his dance moves, his rapping or his singing of Dancin' On The Sidewalk. Max to the max.
Fame: The Musical, Stage Experience, Grand Opera House, York, tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow, 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york
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