Where Take That’s stadium and arena tours have become visual extravaganzas, featuring mechanical elephants and giant robots, the band’s singer-songwriter’s theatre tour takes him back, if not for good, to intimate gigs heavy on traditional stagecraft and audience interaction. “Gary! Gary!” the mostly female audience (some wearing Barlow masks) chant before he bounds on, all peroxide quiff, big grins and black and red suit, which renders him a cross between a totalitarian dictator and Star Trek’s Captain Kirk. “Turn the lights up and let’s ’ave a look at this audience,” he yells. “Oh yes! Saturday in Blackpool!” Although Barlow’s reissued 1997 debut, Open Road, recently went Top 10, solo songs don’t feature prominently in the setlist. In the show opener Since I Last Saw You, however, he reconciles himself to being popular but uncool (“I’ve made my peace with what may happen / Accepted I won’t be in fashion”). This means he can cheerily interrupt songs with Alan Partidge-isms (“Whoo! Nice!” “Did you enjoy that? Yes!”) and trigger a massive singsong with a ticker-tape explosion as early as the second number.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call Barlow a renaissance man, but the singer/retired X Factor judge and occasional Heartbeat actor has built up a more varied portfolio than most performers who served their apprenticeship in northern working men’s clubs. Here, he delves into songs from his musicals, Finding Neverland and Calendar Girls, unveils a curious sideline as tour statistician (“and this song was released on the 11th October 1993”), tactfully avoids his brief but controversial 2014 period as a poster boy for tax avoidance and settles into a comfier role as all-round end-of-the-pier light entertainer. When someone in the crowd holds up a sign reading: “Mummy and me came from Malta. Can I have a hug?” he strides into the stalls to give them one. Someone else with a placard reading: “I’ll never forget sitting on your organ,” is theatrically scolded: “That’s disgusting!” He serenades an audience member called Martina with A Million Love Songs while she sits at the end of his piano and films it on her phone. There’s a dollop of pantomime as he removes his jacket: people start cheering “Stop it!” and bombard him with mock boos when he puts more clothing on.
Otherwise, he knows that people want plenty of Take That nostalgia and doesn’t let them down. New song Relive Those Years tells the band’s story from early days to 2005 reformation with jazz, confessionals and witty self-deprecation. “My appetite for singing slowly dies,” he sings of his post-split wilderness period, rubbing his now trimmer stomach for the punchline, “replaced by an appetite for pies”.
Meanwhile, TT smashes are gleefully reinvented – as big-band brass (Everything Changes), cod jazz funk (Sure), seaside disco stomper (Dan Hartman cover Relight My Fire) – or accompanied by comically bad dancing (Pray). Although he turns in a shift as sincere balladeer, this show is less about gravitas than 90 minutes of old-fashioned, almost music-hall showbiz. Still, it’s hard not to be swept along as a crowd choir turn Back for Good, Patience, Never Forget and the rest into Last-Night-of-the-Proms-type epics. Barlow reminds the audience that party towns and theatres like this are where he started and, in a sense, he has never left. “Goodnight,” he promises. “I’ll see you on the ghost train.”
- At Sunderland Empire, 30 April and 1 May. Box office: 0844 871 7615. Then touring. Then touring until 23 June.
