Calendar Girls Nomination Is No Surprise After Scarborough Triumph

A musical which opened at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre has been shortlisted for one of the UK theatre industry’s major awards - and having seen it on its opening run, I’m hardly surprised.

Calendar Girls: The Musical has been nominated for Best Musical Production at the UK Theatre Awards, putting the production in the running for one of the most significant accolades in the UK regional theatre calendar. The show, a co-production between the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich and the Octagon Theatre in Bolton, began its journey in Scarborough in June under the direction of SJT Artistic Director Paul Robinson.

It is now shortlisted alongside The High Life, Kiss of the Spiderwoman and Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with the winners to be announced in London on Monday 12 October. For anyone who saw the production at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, however, the nomination may feel less like a surprise than a deserved recognition of what was achieved there.

I reviewed the show during its Scarborough run and awarded it five stars, describing it as “one of the theatrical highlights of the summer – if not the calendar year”. Looking back at that review, the reasons for the nomination seem remarkably clear, particularly in the way the production tackled the enormous challenge of staging Calendar Girls in the round - the first time the musical had been presented in this way.

The obvious question was how on earth they would manage the famous calendar sequence with the audience surrounding the action. The answer, I wrote at the time, was something audiences simply had to see for themselves. What might have been an awkward theatrical obstacle became one of the production’s great strengths: imaginative, ingenious, funny and impeccably judged, while never losing sight of the dignity and purpose behind the women’s decision to raise money for charity.

That was characteristic of the whole production. Robinson made extraordinary use of the SJT’s circular stage, keeping all 15 performers visible and the action constantly alive without sacrificing the intimacy that is so important to Tim Firth and Gary Barlow’s story. Rather than making the audience feel like spectators looking in on a community, the staging seemed to draw us into it, surrounding us with the friendships, arguments, laughter and grief at the heart of the story.

The performances were equally important. Rather than relying on a single star, Calendar Girls worked because of the strength of its ensemble of actor-singer-musicians. There were some outstanding individual moments - Christina Meehan’s poignant Scarborough, Fenella Norman’s moving What Age Expects of You, Karen Holmes’s emotional Sunflower and Annie Kirkman’s wonderfully comic My Russian Friend and I, among them - but it was the collective achievement that made the production so convincing.

That balance between comedy and emotion was another of its greatest strengths. The story deals with grief and loss, but the production never wallowed in sentimentality. The laughter made the quieter moments more affecting, while the emotional weight gave the comedy its humanity. By the end of the evening, there were almost as many tears as smiles among the audience around me.

It also felt particularly appropriate that this Yorkshire story should have arrived at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Firth’s long-standing connections with Scarborough and the theatre gave the production a genuine sense of homecoming, while the in-the-round staging added another layer of intimacy to a story about friendship, community, loss and ordinary people doing something extraordinary.

Paul Robinson says the nomination is “an incredibly proud moment” for Scarborough and reflects the shared commitment of the production’s regional partners to bringing high-quality storytelling to local audiences. He also paid tribute to Tim Firth and Gary Barlow for trusting the team to create the show’s first-ever actor-musician version, as well as to the cast, crew and creative team who pushed the production’s theatrical boundaries.

Having watched that process begin at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, it is easy to see why the production has attracted the attention of the UK Theatre Awards. It took a familiar and much-loved story and found a fresh theatrical language for it, celebrating Yorkshire without descending into caricature and handling the story’s themes of friendship, courage, grief and generosity with warmth and intelligence.

The award nomination now gives that Scarborough success an even bigger stage - and, having seen what audiences saw there in June, I’m certainly not surprised that the production has made the shortlist. Fingers crossed it now wins the award!