Close Up – The Twiggy Musical Reviews

"A Sixties icon gets a garishly appealingly jukebox tribute"

"Ben Elton’s show at the Menier Chocolate Factory is as unsubtle as a Pucci print mini dress , but Elena Skye shines as the golden supermodel of the Sixties"

"The whole musical is narrated by Twiggy herself, as played by Elena Skye – who both looks the part and boasts a gutsy voice that’s perfect for songs by 60s sirens like Lesley Gore and Petula Clark. It’s the kind of approach you’d associate more with an embattled one-woman fringe show than a high-budget musical but it just about works here."

"Skye’s down-to-earth, Neasden-accented narration punctures the glamour of swinging London, whipped up here by Jonathan Lipman’s lavish, catwalk-worthy costume design and Jacob Fearey’s kitschy choreography."

"Ben Elton must stop making musicals"

"Random pop songs, clunky social commentary and hardly anything on Twiggy’s modelling career – talk about drawing the short Twig"

"Ben Elton, musicals and theatre critics are not a felicitous combination."

"The first of this show’s myriad problems is that even Elton, who both writes and directs, seems unconvinced about Twiggy’s starring role."

"The show boasts no original music; instead, Elton dips into a random grab-bag of popular songs linked to the years in question"

"Incredibly, almost no time is given over to the details of Twiggy’s superstellar modelling career, surely the entire raison d’etre of this show. Nonetheless a game Elena Skye, a survivor from this summer’s woeful We Will Rock You reboot, certainly looks the part with her Kohl-rimmed eyes and long legs in psychedelically striped tights."

"A fumbled opportunity to celebrate a phenomenon"

"Ben Elton’s compilation musical is strident, obvious and enslaved to the punchline"

"Ben Elton’s bants-heavy compilation musical about Sixties survivor Twiggy is pretty thin stuff. It slots period-appropriate pop hits into an abbreviated, sycophantic telling of the Neasden-born model’s first 33 years, stopping abruptly in 1982. It’s strident, squawky and front-loaded with irony, the cast joshing and eye-rolling with the audience from the start. In the lead role, Elena Skye has a strong, rocky voice and a sarcastic, gorblimey swagger, but she’s a tentative dancer and has been given some truly terrible wigs."

"But in this production, which Elton also directs, every aspect of her life is treated with the same mixture of mawkishness and arch jocularity."

"The thing is, video footage projected on the back wall – showing the young Twiggy... feels much more vibrant than the live action onstage."

"Ben Elton’s strange and sentimental snapshot"

"With a jarring tone and karaoke hits, this show never truly captures the highs and lows of the star’s life"

"In this musical, written and directed by Ben Elton, Elena Skye plays the role with loose-limbed nonchalance and a beautiful singing voice but that is not enough to save the production from simplistic narration, a karaoke soundtrack and its sheer weirdness of tone."

"As the mood swings from hagiography to bizarre comedy, the characters verge on caricatures. The black and white images and video footage of the real Twiggy, so much more compelling than the action on stage, are a hypnotic reminder of a phenomenon who is simply not captured in this over-bright, over-sentimental, rictus smile of a musical."

"Ben Elton’s Twiggy jukebox musical is an exercise in tedium, with a truly random assortment of songs"

"It only takes seven words to make a critic feel faint: ‘a new musical written by Ben Elton’."

"Those tunes are so scattershot in styles and eras that they must have been selected entirely based on what rights were available."

"Part of the problem is that, as much as Twiggy is a cultural icon, her story simply isn’t that interesting - or at least that’s how Elton makes it seem."

"And where Elton’s script does the bare minimum, Jacob Fearey’s choreography is ludicrously maximal, influenced by sixties styles but adding ridiculous amounts of limb-flinging with no real point."

"Along the weary way there are glimpses of what this might have been, if it had decided to be anything other than the most boringly straightforward telling of Twiggy’s life."

"Ben Elton's hammy Twiggy Musical is only skin deep"

"An air of gaudy pastiche hangs over this Menier Chocolate Factory production about the life of the artist otherwise known as Lesley Hornby"

"Elton has Twiggy – decently played by Elena Skye with gawky charisma and a dash of Cockney salt - tell her own story, which means lots of on the nose direct address to the audience. The perhaps unintended effect is to also cast her as a bystander in her own life."

"The kitschy choreographed period settings – from pre war music halls to the psychedelic 60s and bell-bottomed 1970s – reinforce the relentlessly larky, cardboard cut out feel."

"None of this is the fault of a hard-working cast who bring sparkle and verve to characters as flat as magazine covers."

"Tasteless"

"Kitsch musical bio-drama is a cheerfully trashy mess"

"Does Ben Elton’s new bio-musical get beyond the glossy surface of those images to uncover the life, and the real woman, behind the icon? Nah. It’s a jukebox show in which vintage hits are strung together by a tick list of events, served up in dodgy dialogue and cack-handed narration. At best – in Elton’s cartoonish, Day-Glo production – it’s cheerfully trashy. But like a cheap designer knock-off, it’s coming apart at every seam."

"Elena Skye is appealing as Lesley Hornby, the working-class Neasden schoolgirl who became a global phenomenon... Unfortunately, she must also deliver not only Elton’s tediously quipping commentary, but a plethora of mini lectures that, apparently convinced that his audience can’t think for themselves, he has bafflingly crowbarred into the action"

"This is stick-thin stuff"

"Not so much a close-up, more a smudged Polaroid taken from a distance. Ben Elton’s jukebox celebration of his friend Lesley Hornby, the girl from Neasden who became the face of British fashion in the Sixties, plods through some of the key moments in her career but never feels like more than a proficient cuttings job."

"Fresh from playing Scaramouche in the Queen show, Elena Skye, at least makes a creditable job of bringing Twiggy’s street urchin persona to life. She has a strong singing voice too, which almost distracts your attention from Elton’s habit of squeezing vintage pop songs such as Bend Me, Shape Me and Downtown into any convenient crevice."

"Do we get a sense of what, apart from her looks, made Twiggy such a durable cultural figure? Not particularly, although we do see some tantalising archive clips of her in her prime"