Dreamboats And Miniskirts

Congress Theatre, Carlisle Road, Eastbourne

Tuesday, August 26, to Saturday, August 30

THEY now call us the luckiest generation of the 20th century. We were the first recipients of the NHS so if we got sick we could be cured.

We were the first to get a paid education no matter how long we stayed at school or in further education. We were almost certain to get a job as there was little unemployment, so we had the spending power to be important to retailers. We had the opportunity to buy our own property which would later provide us with an investment, and we got the full state pension.”

Not only that, but writer Laurence Marks’s generation lived through the explosion in music, art and creativity that was the 1960s – the creation of the teenager, the rise of The Beatles and the coining of the phrase Cool Britannia.

For Marks and writing partner Maurice Gran writing a sequel to their West End musical hit wasn’t a chance to write Dreamboats And Petticoats II. It was about telling the story of the cultural revolution that took place during their childhoods.

“I would say half joking to [director] Bill Kenwright that Dreamboats And Petticoats was his musical, and Dreamboats And Miniskirts was ours,” says Marks.

“We had never had music of our own before. We were able to go and buy records for six shillings and eightpence – and those records meant the world to us.”

While Dreamboats And Petticoats – set in the period post-Elvis and pre-The Beatles – was about getting people up to dance in the aisles, Marks says Dreamboats And Miniskirts takes a different tone.

“We wanted to project onto the audience what it was like to be young and in love in the 1960s,” he says.

Music played a central role as the writing team behind Birds Of A Feather, The New Statesman, Goodnight Sweetheart and musical hit Save The Last Dance For Me planned the show.

“There are certain groups we knew we couldn’t use such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks as it would take the audience out of the spell,” says Marks.

“We listed songs from 1962 to 1964 and kept them by our side as we wrote the story, so we could tell which songs best served the purpose of the narrative.”

The soundtrack includes songs made famous by lesser-known bands such as The Marvellettes and US-singer Lesley Gore, alongside the likes of Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman, The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie, The Beach Boys’ I Get Around and the two-million-selling A Lover’s Concerto by The Toys.

Marks admits many of the cast didn’t know the original songs.

“They are playing the kids in this show, so most were born around 1994 which isn’t that long ago,” he says.

“I was very fortunate in that some years ago a friend made me two DVDs of [seminal 1960s pop show] Ready Steady Go! so I was able to show them to the cast.

“The girls in particular asked lots of questions about the fashion and the dancing, and whether it was really as great as it looked!

“You could never explain how it had never happened before – and that nobody really knew what was going to happen next. Overnight clubs were springing up around the country where people could dance the night away. In London you could be regarded as an old fogey for walking in wearing last week’s style.”

Marks still remembers the first time he saw someone wearing maroon trousers – a stark contrast to the usual dark grey he and his father both wore.

“We no longer looked to the US for our styles and fashion,” he says.

“London, which was the dowdiest place in Western Europe in terms of fashion in the late 1950s and early 1960s suddenly became the fashion capital of the world almost overnight.”

The show reflects this cultural change in its second half, where the characters go from wearing the sort of clothes their parents had previously worn to sporting their own colourful fashions.

Plotwise in Dreamboats And Miniskirts the clock has advanced two years to 1963.

Dreamboats And Petticoats, the single by Bobby and Laura, hasn’t taken off and they are reduced to performing in children’s television shows. Meanwhile Norman and Sue have settled down to live in non-marital bliss with a baby.

It takes a visit to a dingy Liverpool club called The Cavern, and a close encounter with four leathered jacketed musicians to make Bobby and Laura realise where their music needs to go.

Marks and Gran are still reeling from the double success of their first musical Dreamboats And Petticoats, and the return of Birds Of A Feather on the small screen which became ITV’s biggest comedy hit in 22 years.

“We didn’t really intend on going back to television,” admits Marks. “When we did the Birds Of A Feather stage show it sold out everywhere, and it was clear everyone wanted it back on television.

“For reasons we can’t even begin to understand it got ratings of 12.4 million – where most shows are lucky to pull four million. ITV didn’t know what to do – they even had their figures re-checked!

“We find stage writing really exciting. Birds Of A Feather got good TV ratings, but you don’t get the same buzz as you do sitting in a theatre in Windsor watching Miniskirts and seeing the auditorium become a disco. We would like to stay and do more musical theatre.”

Duncan Hall