Just For One Day: The Band Aid Musical | Live Show Review – TOP 20 MUSICALS 2024: No 20

Matt Wolf
Tuesday, November 26, 2024

You’ll be swept up afresh in the powerhouse music that now, as then, brings an audience roaring to its feet

Craige Els (Bob) and the Company in Just For One Day (Credit: Manuel Harlan)

Most jukebox musicals evoke a specific performer or group’s life and work, whether that be Tina Turner, Neil Diamond, Carole King or The Beach Boys. Just for One Day at the Old Vic does something else, rewinding the clock to recall a momentous event in music history.

The focus here is on Live Aid, the epic concert on behalf of famine relief in Ethiopia that rocked the world in 1985. And if you can overlook an occasional clunkiness in the script, you’ll be swept up afresh in the passions of a bygone age – and the powerhouse music that now, just as it did then, brings an audience roaring to its feet.

For that, credit the fast-rising director Luke Sheppard, who has made an international hit out of a jukebox musical, & Juliet, cut from entirely different cloth: that amalgam of songs from the prolific pen of Swedish songwriter and record producer Max Martin is essentially light and breezy, whereas this latest entry all but blares its message from the rooftops.

Amidst our fretfully polarised times, what has happened to the sense of unity that found an audience of 1.5 billion tuning in on that era-defining July day to two concerts – in London and Philadelphia – that corralled 75 musicians, or more, to donate their services to the cause of famine relief in Ethiopia?

That question underpins every moment of a show that swings between sheer joy at the musicianship on hand and mournfulness at the reason the concert came together in the first place. You don’t have to look too far beyond the high spirits here engendered by the songs to note a requiem for a collective sense of purpose and passion that seems to have evaporated. (By way of proof, consider the shockingly partisan response to the issue of aid to Ukraine.)

Live Aid was such a large-scale endeavour that it might seem to defy narrative encapsulation, especially when you have music from the likes of Queen, The Police, Bob Dylan and many more to fuel a production that clearly has ambitions beyond its Old Vic limited run: gathering the rights to these songs must have been a nightmare.

So you have to commend book writer John O’Farrell, whose CV (Mrs Doubtfire, Something Rotten!) by no means suggested anything of this sort, for locating multiple throughlines. The first and most obvious involves Live Aid’s progenitor, Irishman Bob Geldof, who first set the idea in motion and who spends the whole show resisting the very sanctification that is inherent in the material: Craige Els is commendably cranky in the part whilst all the while communicating a heart of gold. The Ethiopian frontline is movingly embodied by Abiona Omonua as a Red Cross aid worker who presents Geldof first hand with the enormity of the issue. A modern-day perspective – this was almost 40 years ago, after all – exists in Naomi Katiyo’s sceptical Jemma, who voices the white saviour criticisms that have dogged this venture all along.

Inhabiting past and present are Jackie Clune and Hope Kenna as a one-time Live Aid attendee and enthusiast whose present-day self asks outright who amongst the audience was actually at Live Aid at the time. Her Everywoman status finds a surreal counterpart in Julie Atherton’s giddy Margaret Thatcher, here revealing unexpected gifts as a belter that I have never before associated with the Iron Lady. (Come to think of it, Elton John’s ‘I’m Still Standing’ seems an apt musical fit for her.)

Other highlights include Omonua’s genuinely rending ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and full-on company numbers like ‘Radio Ga Ga’, the 26-member cast arrayed across Soutra Gilmour’s bleacher-like set as if ready at any moment to leap into action, which they do. Howard Hudson’s lighting gives off a concert vibe, amplified quite literally to dazzling effect by Gareth Owen’s sound design.

The music-making is epic, the speechifying tendencies of the book problematic: go to
rock out, and chances are that, come the end, you’ll be on your feet standing, too.