Look, I know jukebox musicals aren't cool. I could be extolling the virtues of Guys and Dolls, Cabaret or Singin' in the Rain – all of which I've seen on stage and adored. I know the crimes jukebox musicals have inflicted: I reviewed the original production of We Will Rock You, and saw what happens when theatre sacrifices credibility, authenticity and charm at the altar of Greatest Hits.
But jukebox musicals don't have to be cynical, and they don't have to be bad. On one level, they can introduce audiences to unsuspected depths in a band's music. To fans, they can tap into – and enrich – deep affection for their favourite songs, dramatising and celebrating the values that underpin them. When those values are democratic in spirit, staunch against pretension and hypocrisy, and emotionally honest to a fault, you've got a recipe for a great night out – which is what the Dundee Rep's Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith gloriously provided.
I saw the show twice – in 2007, when it opened in my hometown of Dundee, and again when it toured Scotland (I'm still waiting for the London run). I pretty much cried my way through it both times, and that's only partly because I'm a Proclaimers devotee and homesick expat. It's more that the show, created by playwright and sometime Doctor Who scribe Stephen Greenhorn, takes the forthright songs of Craig and Charlie Reid and makes a show of them in the spirit of John McGrath, Joan Littlewood or (as Guardian critic Mark Fisher wrote in his review) Willy Russell's Blood Brothers: one that's great fun, but also tough, sad, celebratory and true about real, unglamorous lives in 21st-century Britain.
So yes, there's that daft feature of jukebox musicals, as you wonder how hit songs will be winched in. (Why are they making such a point of the girl being from Plymouth and the boy from Edinburgh? Oh, of course: "I would walk 500 miles …") But it's remarkable how seldom Sunshine on Leith has to do that. A few weeks back, a friend – on hearing I was a Proclaimers fan – asked me whether it was true that their song Sky Takes the Soul was about squaddies in Afghanistan.
It isn't, specifically: it appeared on their 1987 debut album , years before we invaded the place. But Greenhorn's musical – and its recent film adaptation (which I haven't seen) – situates the song on the plains of Helmand province. It's the opening number, it's about life and death ("It could be tomorrow or it could be today/When the sky takes the soul/The earth takes the clay") – and from now on, it'll be hard to imagine the song being about anything else.
That's the musical's story: two soldiers, Davy and Ally, return to Leith from Afghanistan, and try to rebuild their lives. It doesn't go smoothly. Ally's marriage proposal is rejected by his childhood sweetheart. Clearly unaware she's in a musical, that young woman – a nurse disillusioned with the part-privatised NHS – moves to the US to seek career fulfilment instead. Meanwhile, Davy gets a job in a call centre while his parents war over the discovery, years on, of dad's infidelity.
These dilemmas are a world away from the wish-fulfilment fantasies of much musical theatre, but they're recognisable from our lives and the world around us. And they're perfectly scored by a band whose songwriting reaches places other bands can't: the Proclaimers write about parenthood, class, lost youth, married life, losing your parents. Here, the title track is sung heartbreakingly by Davy's mum, Jean, to her dying husband, Rab. Elsewhere, a pub full of Hibs fans urge one of their number up the aisle with a rendition of the fantastically carefree chart-topper (well, OK, it got to number 21) Let's Get Married.
Scotland has always been good at popular – direct, demotic, democratic – theatre. Sunshine on Leith – like Cora Bissett's equally exuberant, political and community spirited Glasgow Girls – stakes the country's claim to be the new home of un-glitzy, punch-packing musical theatre. OK, I loved the show more than you might, because I love the band who supplied the tunes. But you'd love it too. It's wise about the hard decisions grown-up life entails. It fronts up to the competing claims of love, work and family. And its big heart has room for both giddy romance and the sometimes painfully compromised reality.
