Reception: The Wedding Present Musical – Review – Slung Low, Leeds

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Reception The Wedding Present Musical – Review – Slung Low, Leeds (1)

By Matt Callard, August 2025

Here’s where two musical worlds collide in unlikely – but occasionally thrilling – fashion. The spiky, hearts-on-sleeve indie of David Gedge is repurposed for a book musical about Leeds students in the mid-to-late 1980s, and the surprise is how often it lands.

What begins with a wink of nostalgia becomes, by degrees, a portrait of friendships that fray, recalibrate and endure. Set in 1980s Leeds and premiering at Slung Low’s Warehouse in Holbeck, the production marks a canny home-town launch for a show steeped in local lore.

At the heart of the fascination is the translation engine itself. Gedge’s trademark growl might be the opposite of musical theatre’s clipped, clean enunciation – but that’s where the electricity lies. Numbers known for their sandpaper textures are re-voiced with clarity and blend, occasionally smoothing the serrations and sometimes sharpening them in unexpected ways. The result is a sometimes uneasy, sometimes wonderful transformation that honours the bite of the originals while letting characters think aloud in harmony in true musical theatre style.

“Left-turn”

This reviewer is more than familiar with The Wedding Present songbook, so nothing here is new to me in the strictest sense – but the interpretations certainly are. “Brassneck,” “Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft” and “My Favourite Dress” are present and correct, the latter driven towards a rip-roaring crescendo that pays off the song’s famous cascading finale.

Elsewhere, the crate-digging is rewarding: a Cinerama (Gedge’s “other” band) deep cut, “Love,” emerges as a highlight, while completists may clock the absence of any Hit Parade selections and sigh accordingly. There is even room for one of the band’s Ukrainian folk-song arrangements – a left-turn that proves oddly apt given the story’s ritual passages.

Writer-director Matt Aston structures the piece as a five-year odyssey for a tight-knit university cohort whose lives remain entangled long after cap-and-gown day. The pre-interval half – an 80-minute sprawl of names, meet-cutes and crossed wires – occasionally drags; exposition piles up, and one or two subplots feel like scaffolding. My eagle-eyed plus one spots a couple of anachronisms too – Milli Vanilli references and Del Boy’s ‘brick’ phone in 1985? Still, the songs are rightly the stars, and Aston’s conceit of letting them shoulder narrative weight bears fruit once the emotional stakes sharpen after the break.

“Lovelorn”

The second half opens with a funeral but then rarely lets up; it’s leaner, darker and, paradoxically, more fun. Although post-show conversations confirmed I wasn’t the only one who thought I was watching the funeral of a different character – but I soon caught up.

The cast is an ensemble of young actor-musicians – emerging and established performers – who play, sing and switch instruments with an ease that underscores the material’s DIY spirit. Their voices throughout keeping their gloriously untampered northern tones.

Zoe Allan is pitch-perfect as the lead, Rachel, her fine facial expressions doing as much story work as any lyric, even when in full Kylie-and-Jason wedding mode. Lawrence Hodgson-Mullings is a gently compelling, lovelorn adventurer, pining for travel as much as for romance; and Rebecca Levy brings a dash of Siouxsie Sioux cool to the graduate-scene tableaux.

Aston and his team scatter Easter eggs like confetti. There are nods to Grappa’s bar, anointing of The Lost Pandas, and a running fascination with Seattle that will raise knowing smiles; elsewhere, posters and projections sketch a city and a subculture with affectionate precision. A cameo gag about a certain future political leader studying law in Leeds in the early ’80s earns one of the evening’s biggest laughs – even if it’s a little clunky. But whether you grew up in Headingley or only ever visited the Cardigan Arms on gig nights, the texture rings true.

“Keep faith”

Musically, the arrangements respect the DNA while making theatrical sense – though I would have liked more volume, more discordance, even more of a sonic challenge. “Brassneck” becomes a kinetic argument; “My Favourite Dress” turns into a bruised duet; and the Ukrainian interlude (“Davni Chasy”) threads folk melancholy through modern grief. If the placement of an airport song can feel a touch on-the-nose, the overall arc is cumulative: by the time the company barrels into “Kennedy” the room is moving as one. The curtain-call morphs into the best-looking indie disco you’re ever likely to see, and if it feels a little like it’s there for the hell of it – well, why not?

Reception is not a greatest-hits revue and not a biopic; it’s a love letter to the sensibility of a writer whose songs have always read like three-minute kitchen-sink plays. When the show keeps faith with that impulse, it hums. When it succumbs to overload, the music rescues it. Either way, Aston’s home-city premiere lands with the right mix of grit and embrace, and proves that indie’s cracked-leather heart can beat convincingly on a musical-theatre stage.

Will it fly and grow and find an even bigger stage? That’s hard to say. Searching hard for a precedent, Richard Hawley’s Standing At The Sky’s Edge was a theatrical triumph. What will musical theatre afficionados make of it? I’m genuinely interested to find out. But still, for ageing Weddoes die-hards and curious newcomers alike, there are plenty of reasons here to RSVP.

Reception: The Wedding Present Musical‘ is at Slung Low until 6th September

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