Standing at the Sky’s Edge – Reviews Round-up [Updated]

"Richard Hawley and Chris Bush’s monumental musical love letter to a Sheffield estate is unlike anything else in the West End" (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"I was blown away by the emotional power of this show, about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical I’ve seen before."

"What makes this an instant classic is the Crucible's outstanding production, a true ensemble achievement. It is the right way to approach a community-based story."

"Director Robert Hastie and choreographer Lynn Page meticulously, brilliantly layer their lives and times into a single shared space."

"Chris Bush’s book does a good job, bringing some laughs to lighten the heavy industrial themes. There are a couple of bum notes (would striking ’80s workers complain about ‘wanting to be seen’?), and I found the wrap-up rushed and sentimental. But it’s still much stronger than your average jukebox musical"

"... ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ has all the feels – joy, lust, fear, sadness, despair, are crafted into an emotional edifice which stands nearly as tall as the place that inspired it."

"This beautiful show breaks my heart and fills my soul" (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"Standing at the Sky's Edge fuses Richard Hawley's glorious music with a viscerally heart-rending tale of his home town, Sheffield, and its iconic Park Hill Estate."

"I've said it before, this is the greatest new British musical for years."
"Britpop legend Richard Hawley's back catalogue soundtracks a gut-punchingly charged tale of three sets of inhabitants of one flat across six decades in Sheffield's iconic brutalist Sky Hill estate."

"Chris Bush's note-perfect script tugs at heartstrings as much as it tickles funny bones. Too many shows overdo the misery or suffering, which usually leaves me cold. Make me laugh – and then I will cry. Make me care and I will listen."

"The entire cast is superb, the musicians shine and the inventive, propulsive choreography works shopping trolleys and swinging carrier bags into a Sheffield version of La La Land."

"A soaring achievement with new edges for the West End" (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"The hit musical is as brilliant as ever as it moves to the Gillian Lynne Theatre"

"Bush, sure to be one of the most exciting playwrights around, has pieced together a tightly wrought tapestry of intergenerational harmony and conflict."

"... rather than being a “state-of-the-nation” epic, Bush makes sure it’s the individual characters that are placed front and centre – scenes hop backwards and forwards between the decades, washing over one another as the years coalesce and contrast."

"Compared to the cavernous Olivier stage, where the show last played in London, the slightly more intimate confines of the Gillian Lynne make the experience feel more like an embrace – the audience almost peering over the flat and into the hearts and minds of its residents."

"As much as Hawley’s tunes are cracking earworms, much of the praise must go to orchestrator, arranger and originating music supervisor Tom Deering, who has refashioned them into richly crafted musical numbers, aided no end by sound designer Bobby Aitken."

"Richard Hawley’s perfect love letter to Sheffield" (National Theatre)

"This stylish production set on the iconic Park Hill estate is a terrific blend of power and heart"

"... a bittersweet musical love letter to the city that reaches far beyond South Yorkshire to encompass a haunting meditation on the universal idea of home."

"There are unmistakable echoes of Girl from the North Country in the construction formula: take the back catalogue of a well-known songwriter, in this case Sheffield native Richard Hawley, and embed it in a high-class script – all credit to book writer Chris Bush – that drips with a sure sense of time and place."

"Hastie has assembled an outstanding ensemble of actors who give such compelling performances that copious sniffles, my own included, could be heard at the end."

"Five stars for Standing at the Sky’s Edge, an exhilarating, big-hearted musical" (National Theatre)

"... Chris Bush’s Standing at the Sky’s Edge announces itself and the mixture of sweet and tart, tender and tough, that will drive this exhilarating, big-hearted musical"

"The structure has drawbacks — the stories are inevitably clipped and simplified — and sometimes Bush states political points that are already clear from the narrative. But her script is sparkily witty and affectionate, she interweaves the stories with great skill so that we see patterns repeat and consequences unfold, and she and the cast bring the characters to vibrant life."

"Robert Hastie’s superb production, on Ben Stones’s soaring set, orchestrates all this beautifully, overlapping the stories to revealing or playful effect. His staging is peppered with standout performances, particularly from Omole, Young and Wooding... A wonderfully generous, uplifting piece of theatre."

"Six decades on a Sheffield estate... and you'll love it" (National Theatre)

"Soaring love song to Sheffield"

"This mighty, moving play with music should be engraved 'made in Sheffield' like my best knives."

"Weaving the lives, loves and losses of three sets of residents over six decades, it sounds local and domestic... But the show's stretch and scope is epic, sweeping wider and higher than Ben Stone's evocative concrete design to chart the history of post-war regeneration, de-industrialisation, immigration and, finally, privatisation and gentrification common to so many British inner cities."

"The title tune — loud enough to make your kidneys vibrate — raises the roof, but not as high as Faith Omole's yearning rendition of Coles Corner. Fabulous numbers, fabulous production."

"A deeply moving, monumental musical that really matters" (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"The West End transfer of this show about a Sheffield estate offers rare emotional and intellectual ambition – and deserves to be a huge hit"

"Moving the show to the West End might conceivably look like a commercially risky step too far, but there’s something about the defiant boldness of that assault on theatreland together with the apt concrete aesthetic of the Gillian Lynne that makes the show seem at home on its own terms."

"Hawley’s folkish rock music is wonderfully unembarrassed about raw emotion – his beautiful songs full of melancholy, tenderness, warmth and yearning, hammering at the door of your heart, demanding to be let in. Bush harnesses that ardency to show love flowering amid shifting, difficult circumstances, so that the existing songs alternately articulate individual predicaments and speak to wider communal experience."

"Some of the off-beat choreographic flourishes can look a bit ‘Legs & Co’ too. Still, it’s so beautiful to listen to, and rises to such rousing peaks, that if – as with the estate itself – you embrace it warts and all"

"Standing at the Sky’s Edge worked its musical magic on me" (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"This saga of three generations living in a brutalist Sheffield high-rise estate is something special. No wonder it’s transferred to the West End"

"There is a touch of the Alan Ayckbourn about Bush, both in this sort of proudly theatrical conceit and the light wit with which she dishes out some knotty ideas."

"Most importantly, you can’t take these stories in isolation. They are nestled too firmly in lavish staging, strong performances and most of all songs from Hawley’s back catalogue that just keep on unpicking your emotions."

"To pick just a few standouts from a fine cast: Laura Pitt-Pulford and Lauryn Redding beguile as the opposites-attract couple. Samuel Jordan has a lolloping charm as Jimmy, who befriends Joy, the teen from Liberia. As Joy, Elizabeth Ayodele’s performance of the Sheffield serenade Coles Corner is so soaring it is like a mini musical in itself."

"It’s a jukebox musical: smartly welded together rather than sculpted. And yet it adds up to something special. I was more than happy to spend almost three hours letting Standing at the Sky’s Edge work its tender magic on me."

"A stirring musical reinforced with Sheffield steel" (National Theatre)

"Defiantly wedded to Sheffield, this uplifting musical has a universal message about community and gentrification"

"Who’d have guessed a musical about Sheffield’s brutalist Park Hill housing estate could be so uplifting? Playwright Chris Bush has worked the stirring earworms of her fellow native, the much-feted singer-songwriter Richard Hawley, into a beguiling triple narrative covering the development’s utopian postwar conception, its demise in the Eighties and its 21st century yuppie rebirth."

"Even though Sheffield runs like arterial blood through Hawley’s output not all the songs deployed here suit their theatrical repurposing. Both individual and interconnected elements of the three storylines are a bit too neat. But this remains a huge achievement by Hastie and Bush, one of our most prolific and arresting writers: a bold step forward for musical theatre, that brings northern, working-class steel to the South Bank."

"This is a democratic, demotic work where the cast and Ben Stones’ set – complete with Park Hill’s famous neon sign replicating the original graffiti scrawl “I love you will U marry me” – seem to be in direct conversation with the audience and the auditorium. Smashing."

"Seizes your heart and squeezes it tight" (National Theatre)

"Thrilling Sheffield-set musical charts six decades of social change and salutes the extraordinary in everyday lives"

"... the piece is a salute to resilience and community. It’s jubilant and defiant, with the emotional force of a juggernaut. Written by playwright Chris Bush, with songs by musician and sometime Pulp band member Richard Hawley, it elevates the extraordinary in ordinary lives, while charting 60 years of social change. It’s as ugly-beautiful as Park Hill itself, and in a production by Robert Hastie that is both tough and tender, it seizes your heart and squeezes it tight."

"Their intersecting narratives are superimposed on to each other, characters crossing paths in the kitchen or sitting side by side at the dinner table. Bush’s dialogue may have an occasional hint of contrivance, but there’s a thrilling scope and elan to the way in which the writing embraces the personal and political and the sweep of recent history, taking in reality at the sharp end of government policies, strikes, gentrification and class inequality – all of which has obvious enduring pertinence. And the show’s texture is fantastically rich. Hawley’s music is sweet and rough, woozy and boozy, wistful and enraged, while Lynne Page’s choreography crams the stage with vitality."

"Richard Hawley pulls on the heartstrings in his Sheffield opus" (National Theatre)

"This new musical traces the intersecting lives of three families on the Park Hill estate in this spine-tingling and sentimental love song to the steel city"

"Directed by Robert Hastie, it looks at first like it is relishing a little too much in its theatricality as the three sets of characters swirl around the set together, in their own parallel worlds. There is little story in-between songs initially and Chris Bush’s book comes with stock characters."

"But it blooms into a glorious love letter indeed, revealing a big, booming heart and astonishing sound. Hawley’s music and lyrics stand front and centre of the production..."

"The cast is uniformly strong and their singing outstanding."

"It has an upbeat spirit to the last but does not take the full turn into the happy ending we are expecting, while the sentimentality is leavened by Bush’s witty book."

"A joyful, gritty show with fire in its heart" (National Theatre)

"A musical set on a Sheffield housing estate may not be the easiest pitch to Broadway producers - but they'd be missing out on the best British musical in decades."

"Singer/songwriter Richard Hawley and playwright Chris Bush have fashioned a work that is both site-specific and universally epic."

"Hawley’s songs are wry, bittersweet and melodic with hints of lounge jazz and Northern country and western."

"It’s a joyful, gritty show with fire in its heart."

"Richard Hawley’s paean to Sheffield finds a home from home" (National Theatre)

"... the lives of these imagined residents – a steelworker and his wife from 1961, Liberian refugees in the 80s, a yuppie Londoner and her on-off girlfriend from more or less now – tell an instantly recognisable story of England’s industrial decline, property speculation, changing population, political dereliction."

"Some weaknesses are exposed. Hawley’s marvellous songs are more planted than propelling. Lynne Page’s choreography is, well, pedestrian, with characters walking along with outstretched arms as if they were playing aeroplanes. Yet soaring voices – particularly Maimuna Memon’s and Alex Young’s – still stir. As does the project of a show that combines political hope and excoriation with the patient rendering of individual lives. It is a good week when the National earns its name."

"A love letter to community with backbone of steel" (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"It’s an odd hybrid, part musical, part soap opera... a sincere if uneven love letter to the power of community."

"In a way, the show is the blue-collar equivalent of Plaza Suite, the venerable Neil Simon comedy currently being revived at the Savoy."

"There’s certainly no shortage of passion in the performances, even if the script sometimes resembles a conscientiously assembled checklist of social issues. Laura Pitt-Pulford gives the stand-out vocal display as Poppy, a middle-class Londoner who has fled north after breaking up with her laddish fiancé. Elizabeth Ayodele impresses too as Joy, a young Liberian girl trying to build a new life on the concrete walkways."

"If there’s a problem with many of the other polished songs, it’s that they sometimes seem to have been inserted into the action almost at random."

"Breathless and big hearted” (Gillian Lynne Theatre)

"Chris Bush’s sprawling, big-hearted musical charting 60 years of social change in Sheffield arrives in the West End"

"Bush’s characters are instantly recognisable, but their triumphs and tragedies are reduced to brief, emotionally resonant vignettes in Hastie’s headlong, breathless staging."

"Sheffield-born songwriter Richard Hawley, formerly of bands Pulp and Longpigs, provides a nicely varied catalogue of wistful, poppy musical numbers, with an emphasis on bright, reverb-heavy guitar sounds and swelling, heartstring-tugging violins."

"it’s the big ensemble numbers that carry the production along, with There’s a Storm a-Comin’ and the title song evoking a fragile world at the mercy of sudden changes and chance occurrences. It’s a stirring tribute to the resilience of community and the importance of remaining optimistic."

"Shining a spotlight on Sheffield's brutalist Park Hill estate" (National Theatre)

"This musical, now playing at the National, has an intriguing concept but the content is flimsy"

"Their lives, in Chris Bush's deftly structured script, are layered together like onion skins, each always visible beneath the others. Thematically, too, their stories reverberate off each other, buffeted by upheaval, loss and politics: the collapse of the steel industry; gentrification."

"Yet this often lovely piece of theatre also falls short of its own ambition. The songs seem to float free of the action, there not to further the story but to provide a generalised sonic mood board. Bush's script, though marinated in the history of Sheffield, is compromised by its desire to simultaneously serve as a potted history of modern Britain."

"Ultimately, Robert Hastie's superbly acted production is most effective as a series of beautifully choreographed tableaux. It's gorgeous to look at and moving to witness, but like that neon sign, the concept trumps the content."

"At its best Richard Hawley and Chris Bush’s musical love letter to Sheffield is a thing of elemental power" (National Theatre)

"Robert Hastie’s production – which received ecstatic reviews in Sheffield, twice – feels both bracingly different and agreeably familiar. I’m not usually the biggest fan of Hawley’s nostalgic retro-pop, and at times his soft-focussed ‘50s-style ballads feel like an odd for a trio of stories entirely set after the era the music harks back to. But the heavier songs off the titular album are a better fit: the awesome Zeppelin swagger of the title track is like nothing I’ve heard in a musical before, and it intersects with the action perfectly, capturing the stormy crisis points being faced by the characters at that point."

"Bush has a great knack for mixing rabble-rousing populism with more astringent social commentary..."

"I have to say that I didn’t actively love it: Bush is good on themes but there are points here where her character writing tends towards the soapy and melodramatic. While you could reasonably argue that that’s what you want from a musical, I found some of the plot twists a bit crass."

(National Theatre)

"Ben Stones’s imposing concrete set includes the signature graffito, “I love you, will u marry me,” that was painted on a concrete bridge of the housing project in 2001 and became an unlikely Sheffield icon."

"Love in its various forms turns out to be the topic connecting the show’s three plot strands, each set in different eras."

"Hawley’s full-bodied score, meanwhile, folds this singer-songwriter’s back catalog together with new songs, yearning and hopeful, that catch at the heart. The title song, taken from a 2012 album, is a rousing company number that gets the second act off to a propulsive start, and whose elation is characteristic of the show as a whole."