Great songs, a funny and heart-warming story, colourful costumes, electrifying dance routines and guest appearances by iconic popstars… Now that’s what we call a recipe for a great musical – and the brand new show NOW That’s What I Call A Musical will be serving up all this and more when it hits the road this September for a UK and Ireland tour.
Audiences can expect the ultimate playlist in a show that celebrates 40 years of the iconic NOW That’s What I Call Music compilations brand, with a particular focus on 80s classics by such artists as Cyndi Lauper, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Tears For Fears, Spandau Ballet and many more.
For Nina Wadia, who stars as Gemma, it’s not only a brand new show – it’s also her first-ever venture into musical theatre. “And I’m genuinely terrified,” she admits. “But I love challenges in my career and I’ve tried every genre, I think, thus far apart from musicals. So I thought ‘Why not?'”
She grins. “Its 80s songs and you can sing them however you like, as far as I’m concerned, so long as it’s with enthusiasm. Then there’s the dancing side, which I’m actually looking forward to because with Craig choreographing it’s fun as hell.”
Best-known for the groundbreaking sketch show Goodness Gracious Me and for playing Zainab Masood on EastEnders, the actress and OBE sees Gemma as a relatable character. “Her life didn’t quite go the way she expected it to. She depended a lot on her best friend and there’s a lot of love there between them. And I actually come from that kind of background myself, because my oldest friends are my school friends from the 80s.”
One of Nina’s fondest memories from that era is listening to NOW tapes on her Walkman in Hong Kong, where she grew up. “You’d wait until the weekend to buy them and at home people would complain about me playing them too loud. On my Walkman I could listen to them as loud as I liked.”
She grins again. “Those songs were the soundtrack to my life. If you fell in love you really fell in love and if you hurt, you really hurt. I remember everything being so dramatic in my teenage years.”
Guest stars including Sinitta will be appearing at various venues throughout the tour, playing themselves as they magically manifest to give the characters wisdom and advice as well as to sing some of their greatest hits. And Nina is already fan-girling over them, saying: “At the photo shoot I was all over them and they’re as excited as I am about doing the show. If I wasn’t in it, it’s the sort of thing I would definitely go and watch.”
The NOW brand is nostalgic for the singer, who was born in Seattle but travelled a lot with her mother, the disco-soul star Miguel Brown, and moved to East Sussex when she was young.
Because of her mother’s schedule, Sinitta attended boarding school. “And the NOW albums were a big part of my time there,” she remembers. “We’d put our pocket money together to buy them, then at the weekend we had our own little discotheque in the common room.”
Coming to fame with such huge hits as So Macho and Toy Boy in 1985 and 1987 respectively, she ended up on those albums herself. “That was really exciting and it was a big deal – to be on the album instead of saving up each week to buy one. Getting to do that and also be on Top of the Pops was kind of crazy because I don’t think I ever dreamed that that would ever happen to me.”
On the tour Sinitta will also be appearing in Sheffield, Canterbury, Nottingham and Norwich. She loves being on stage, saying: “It’s the connection to the audience. I love doing film and television but there’s something special about being able to see, feel and hear their reaction.”
She feels people recall the 80s fondly because: “You’d meet in clubs and bars, you danced together and communicated in person, before mobile phones and social media and all that stuff. As much as we had dodgy fashion, even that was fun because we didn’t have money so we had to be creative.”
She laughs. “Everyone had big hair and I still do. And pop music was this universal language. It didn’t matter where you were from, how old you were, how rich or poor, music brought everyone together. Musicals like this are the same. They offer a collective escapism.”
Now That’s What I Call A Musical is at Norwich Theatre Royal between 1 – 5 Oct. For more information or to book, visit norwichtheatre.org or call the Box Office on 01603 630 000.
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