Review: Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

The Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club’s production of Everyone’s Talking About Jamie is warm, crackling and terse for all 165 minutes of its runtime. We meet Jamie New, a vivacious and energetic Mathew Weatherhead, who wants simply to be a drag queen. The problem? He is 16 in Sheffield.

We follow Jamie and his charming found family through the pains of stigma and euphoric highs of self-expression. Director James Critchley skilfully balances the sombre, the poignant and the camp in this convincing and profoundly fun production.

Image credits: Kitty Fay

Everyone should be talking about Jamie: Weatherhead commands the stage, equally convincing in glib rebukes as he is in vulnerable moments of strife. His is a performance of vitality, oscillating as he does between self assured confidence and all-too-teenage fallibility. Weatherhead’s Jamie navigates the trials of a young drag artist in a hostile community in a manner that is sensitive and feels deeply true.

In and out of stilettos, Weatherhead’s winning Jamie is the staunch heart of the production. He is matched impeccably by Juliette Ball as his long-suffering mother, who balances a warm, bolstering spirit with a deep and acute hurt in a moving depiction of unconditional love. She undoubtedly had eyes welling, before swapping out tugging on heartstrings for a truly funny back and forth with a fabulous Ray (Senya Kang). Likewise juggling physical comedy and the real weight of loving someone suffering, is Sabrine Ahmed as Pritti, Jamie’s compatriot in disrupting the classroom’s ecosystem – the two play off each other very well.

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Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is brought to life by the drag performances that it honours (Leo Lu as Tray Sophisticay, Connor Nainthy as Laika Virgin, Wilf Jenkinson as Sandra Bollock). Max Parkhouse is excellent as Hugo, retired act Loco Chanelle and hilarious quasi-mentor to Jamie as he navigates his drag debut.

Image credits: Kitty Fay

Apart from some discrepancies on regional accents a nonetheless winning ensemble more than matches the leads with exemplary, lively cohesion. Notable also is the choreography, and praise must go to Ruby Iverson for this aspect of the visual spectacle. Indeed, the charming physicality of the ensemble does much to win the audience and transport us to the frontier of adolescence in Sheffield.

The production is brought to vivid immediacy by an excellent live band, fantastic in producing a rich soundscape. Evident throughout the performance is the acute effort gone to by all co-ordinating parties to achieve such a spectacle, by accent coach, choreographer, set painters, technicians. The charming and efficiently deployed set design transform the ADC into an immersive, saturated world of classrooms and yellow kitchens, and must be credited for the merit that it lends the show. Despite being such a glossy, high-quality production, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie retains the laminate flooring and grit of high school. For all its glitz, moments of the production prove it can be cruel, crude and deeply sad.

This moving tribute to drag, community and radical self-love and acceptance is more than done justice by the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club – head to the ADC for a moving night of musical theatre at its most compelling and timely.

Image credits: Kitty Fay

4.5/5

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie is playing in the ADC theatre from Wednesday 19th – Saturday 29th March. Don’t miss out – grab your tickets here!

Featured image credits: Kitty Fay