Rhinestone Mondays, The Mayflower (From Daily Echo)

Rhinestone Mondays, The Mayflower

9:25am Wednesday 28th September 2011 in Stage Reviews By Lorelei Reddin, Entertainments Editor

REVIEW: Rhinestone Mondays, The Mayflower

RARELY has the label karaoke musical been quite so apt.

But it’s not quite that straight forward – by the end the cast have the entire audience on their feet in a mass line-dancing session!

Of course, no-one would ever have commissioned a musical in the We Will Rock You or Mamma Mia vein or that cheesy pop band Steps, but this might as well have been it. Not only do two former members of the band – Ian H Watkins and Faye Tozer – appear in Rhinestone Mondays, but so do some of their songs.

The Stetsons are out in force on stage as we run through a catalogue of country and western classics, the audience getting increasingly hyped up until a raucous dance-along finale to 5,6,7,8 and Achy Breaky Heart.

Former Eastender Shaun Williamson is the undoubted star of this show, bringing laughs a plenty in his role as customer-less barman Brian.

As we descend on the social club for meetings of the Warbleswick Monday Night All Star Line Dancing Club, we meet a gallery of clichéd sitcom characters.

There’s the little old lady with flatulence and false teeth, the loud Welsh gay tap-dancer and the brazen divorcee, played marvellously by Lyn Paul, best known for Blood Brothers.

Expect fighting, feuding and of course a love story, plus a flimsy plot on which to base a series of cheesetastic singalong numbers.

Do not leave your dancing shoes behind for this one.

It’s very much a night of karaoke.

But here there are lots of laughs without the bum notes.

And, like any good karaoke night – they knew it was wrong, but few were able to resist performing themselves.