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Guardian - Mick Brown
The idea of a musical based around the songs of Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook - better known as Squeeze - seems an immediately attractive and common-sense proposition. Squeeze's songs are not simply strong pop melodies, but highly literate and picturesque, graphic in their portrayal of individuals and situations, sharpened with an uncommon verbal wit and clarity. But they are, at the same time, very self contained.
Labelled with Love - which is built principally around the songs from the album, East Side Story - wisely does not try to use the songs as narrative in the manner of an Evita or Jesus Christ Superstar, but sets the action with a band playing in a South London pub, where the music can quite naturally stand in its own right when not being used as a theatrical device.
In this respect, Labelled with Love is very much rock and roll performed in a theatre context, rather than theatre half-heartedly borrowing the idioms of rock.
The storyline also places the piece firmly in a parochial context with our struggling rock band providing the last chance for live entertainment to save the Nail in the Heart, which is being threatened by the brewery with transformation into a neon-lit, disco cocktail bar.
"It's happening everywhere, Bermondsey has fallen, Peckham's on the way, and Lewisham is sure to follow," laments the pub's teddy boy landlord to a sigh of exasperated recognition from the Albany audience. This, thank heavens, is not destined to be the stuff of the West End charabanc crowd.
The script by John Turner (who also directs) crackles with humour, gusto and no little insight into South London manners and the vagaries of rock music ambition and success.
But there is a basic flaw in the structure with the introduction of a sub-plot about a high-powered American businesswoman who strays into the Nail in search of her long-lost mother - a situation of such tortuous complexity that the piece is all but derailed.
Thankfully, Labelled with Love is ultimately retrieved by its imaginative staging, athletic choreography, those clever Squeeze songs, and some notable performances from the cast of six. Colen Marsh is particularly good as landlord Eric, with his repertoire of camp mannerisms and pretensions.
It may not be Gilbert and Sullivan - to whom Squeeze were once compared by one American critic - but it is funny, warmhearted, and highly enjoyable - the closest thing yet seen to a "rock musical" in the purest sense of the term.
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