Summer in the City
Upstairs at the Gatehouse
 

OVATION’S Christmas show is a jukebox musical in which the tunes burst out of the jukebox and threaten to throttle the story. But that’s no great pity as the plot is only a device to showcase the songs of the ’60s. And what wonderful songs they are, full of vitality and heartfelt emotion, throbbing with joy.

Audiences of a mellow age are time-warped back to those heady days to wallow in hazy memories of rock and pop and groovy mayhem while younger people will find out just what they have missed.

Set in a cafe in Carnaby Street Soho, (which I assume is modelled on the 2i’s coffee bar which  spawned rock’n’roll in this country), whose owner Hetty (Helen Goldwyn) a wise, Jewish mother hen type employs as coffee boy Sam (Connor Arnold), a square-jawed American who’s a dead ringer for Superman and delivers the coffee with oodles of entrepreneurial pizzazz and go-getterism.