From the 10th Anniversary 'First-Night':
"Blood still flowing after a 10-year
run - Willy Russell's award-winning West End musical Blood
Brothers - set in Liverpool, about boy twins separated at
birth - is 10 years old this week... You might suppose that
Kenwright's production is a weary old warhorse by now. Against
the odds, however, this show proved to be in surprisingly
fine fettle on its anniversary press night. Bob Tomson's
cast were energetic and tightly drilled... I've never been
blown away by Blood Brothers. What I do like is that Russell
(responsible for book, music and lyrics) has created a rock
musical about common people. He risks an unhappy ending,
and the story touches at least on profound issues."
The Daily Telegraph
"...Emerging during the decade that
landed us with Cats and Starlight Express, Blood Brothers
was always something of an anomaly as an Eighties musical.
It dealt with ordinary, recognised people, for a start,
rather than a menage of poetic moggies or a set of singing
choo-choos. It was on a humane scale, too: you did not go
out humming the lavish set and the budget. And, though it
can and did travel it does not have the limitless exportability
of one of those imperialistic music-theatre equivalents
of the McDonald's chain. Adroitly entwining the culturally
specific and the mythic, the show expresses pain at the
human devastation caused by Thatcherite economics via a
folk-tale plot about the bond over two decades between twins
who are separated at birth, brought up on different sides
of the Liverpudlian class divide, and apprised of their
true relationship only at the tragic denouement. Threaded
through the saltily amusing script and the open-hearted
score are familiar Russell themes: the gains and losses
of upward mobility; the difficulty of assessing the advantages
in another person's social situation from a non-self-referring
perspective; the burdens of being a woman and the yearning
to escape from domestic drudgery... Yes, it is true that
Blood Brothers pushes the discrepancy between the twins'
life chances to extremes and is not above loading the dice
musically either. But its heart is in the right place -
how many musicals present a social argument of any kind?
For that alone I raise my glass." The
Independent
"Willy Russell's 1983 musical was the
provincial 'real-life' antidote to mega-musicals in the
decade of Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber. But
the current version, celebrating ten years in the West End,
looks crude and thin and is far less well performed than
it was on the show's famous opening night in Liverpool.
There was never enough of Russell's gutsy, folksy music,
never enough good songs to counteract the obviously realised
concept of twins separated by social conditioning and doomed
to die in a Scouse, angry view of Thatcherite Britain. Lyn
Paul, who liked to teach the world to sing with The New
Seekers, has a good stab at Mrs Johnstone, who gives away
one of her twins to the woman whose house she cleans. She
can never let go, and the boys keep seeing each other. They
bond. The show is either starkly tragic or frankly implausible,
I'm not sure which. Dennis Potter's ruse (in Blue Remembered
Hills) of adults playing kids looks tiresomely dated. Andy
Snowden as poverty-bound Mickey and Mark Hutchinson as privileged
Eddle graduate with thudding obviousness, to criminality
and the local council. The show had innocence and terror
15 years ago. The vastly talented Willy Russell - author
of Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine - should have moved
on by now. Every performance is greeted with a standing
ovation. Like Shakespeare's Hermia I am amazed and know
not what to say." The
Daily Mail
"Ten years on, the moral's still in
the message - How to explain the durability of Willy Russell's
Blood Brothers, which celebrates, in my view deservedly,
its tenth birthday in the West End this week? It isn't the
music and it isn't the message. Russell has composed one
nice number, a song that uses Marilyn Monroe as a symbol
of everything from love to lunacy and so can be reprised
again, again and again; but the rest of his score makes
it pretty clear that the primary strength of the author
of Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine is words, not hums.
As for the overt message, that becomes evident at the end,
when the twin brothers who were separated at birth, and
brought up at different ends of the social spectrum, are
united in terror and violence... Whatever its rational pretensions,
the piece beats with a primitive heart. Russell virtually
concedes as much by failing to explain why, in defiance
of social probability and the class logic he is busily exposing,
Eddie and Mickey meet as boys, exchange blood vows, and
remain close friends into their prime. He is exploiting
the myths and legends about the eerie symbiosis of twins.
He is writing a folk ballad for the Thatcher and post-Thatcher
eras - and why not? Somewhere here is the basic explanation
for the show's continuing attraction; but Bob Tomson's production
is still a pacey, lively affair, especially when the adults
play their childhood selves... But whatever the cavils,
Blood Brothers is still one of the best pieces of popular
theatre around." The
Times
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