ED2015 4/5 Reviews ED2015 Musical Reviews

Sunshine On Leith (Captivate Theatre)

By Sarah Murphy | Published on Saturday 22 August 2015

It’s dawn and the armed forces are singing: “I don’t say it will be, I just say it may”. A similar note of adorable hesitance runs throughout this courteous and charming musical, a love song to Scottishness and memories kept in real photo albums, rather than Facebook ones. Musicals don’t tend to have much in common with the real world – that niggling tendency to break out into song every five minutes – but ‘Sunshine on Leith’ creates a world that is wonderfully, poignantly human. The title song consists of simply repeated words – not the most lyrically complex, but that’s kind of the point: real sorrow is inarticulate, stuttering. I left damp-eyed, humming the tune to ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’.

The Famous Spiegeltent, until 31 Aug.
tw rating 4/5 | [Sarah Murphy]