“Bad Girls: The Musical” Breaks in to the West End

From Mandana Jones’ silent entrance to Nikki and Helen’s quiet exit, the Bad Girls: The Musical London gala in mid-September illustrated how much has changed since the Bad Girls television show (now airing on Logo, AfterEllen.com’s parent company) first aired in Britain in 1999.

Jones, who played Nikki Wade in the TV version, arrived just minutes before the musical began. She made her way toward the Garrick Theatre on a crowded sidewalk filled with paparazzi and celebrities, including former British tennis star Greg Rusedski, actors from the British TV series Footballers’ Wives, and former Bad Girls stars Victoria Alcock (Julie S.), Alicia Eyo (Denny Blood), Claire King (Karen Betts) and Kika Mirylees (Julie J.).

Before Jones could enter the theater, a photographer accidentally shoved her, shouting “Danielle, Danielle, over here!” as he scrambled for a picture of Danielle Lloyd, the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant who was stripped of her beauty pageant title for posing nude in Playboy. Jones later said she laughed at the irony of the moment, before slipping unnoticed into the theater, relieved at having avoided the spotlight.

Compare that entrance to the frenzied greeting Jones and Simone Lahbib (the TV show’s Helen Stewart) received at a Mission Impossible II premiere and after-party five years ago (shown in the video below), and you get a sense of just how much has changed in the U.K. since the TV show first became a hit.

   

Jones told AfterEllen.com that she attended the gala to show her support and to “see some of the other bad girls I haven’t seen in a long time.” She added, “I was quite curious to see the musical. I was part of that show, early on, and this is part of its journey.”

It is, in fact, a remarkable journey, one that began with an independently produced women’s prison drama that won over a country while featuring one of prime-time television’s first lesbian relationships.

And now, eight years later, a musical based on the TV show – the first major musical written by lesbians – has opened in the historic West End, in a late-Victorian theater that once housed a production starring Laurence Olivier. The musical opens, appropriately enough, with the loud clanging of a gate – welcome to the misfits, madness and mayhem that make up G-Wing at HMP Larkhall.

The stark first image is of Rachel Hicks, the mousy young mother from the first season of the TV show. She stands at the front of the stage wearing nothing but her underwear, shivering as she awaits a coarse and humiliating inspection by Sylvia “Bodybag” Hollamby (played, as she was in the TV show, by Helen Fraser).

Rachel’s naked humiliation (she is, we’re reminded, still lactating for the baby that was taken from her) is followed by the evening’s first song, “I Shouldn’t Be Here,” in which the inmates introduce themselves:

Shell Dockley: Lifer. Murder. Well, just a bit of torture, really. Didn’t expect the dozy twat to go and die on me. Crystal Gordon: Shoplifting. But the good book says the Lord helps them who helps themselves, innit? Denny Blood: Seven years. Arson. It was a rubbish kids’ home anyway! The two Julies: The oldest profession in the book/Combined/With a sideline in the wallets that we took.

And, finally, Nikki Wade (played by Caroline Head) struts onto stage for the first time, defiant as ever:

Nobody’s hero Somebody’s fool Don’t go mistaking me for Somebody who’ll – Ever give a damn For what they think I am.

In some ways – particularly in regard to its social and political significance – the musical could stop right there.

Just a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square, in an area nearly 100,000 people visit every day, an all-female creative team has the audacity to present a musical with a tough dyke inmate singing a song that argues some women “shouldn’t be here” – shouldn’t be in prison and shouldn’t be taken from their children, their lives disrupted for nonviolent crimes resulting from abuse, desperation and neglect.

“I don’t do scared,” Bad Girls inmate Yvonne Atkins famously pronounces, both onstage and in the TV show. The same might be said for the creators of Bad Girls: The Musical, who have the nerve to take mainstream audiences behind the bars of a women’s prison, where they raise important social issues while portraying women of wide-ranging ages, sizes and social classes.

The day after the gala, at a café near the theater, Maureen Chadwick, the musical’s co-writer, and her partner of more than 20 years, Kath Gotts (the composer, lyricist and co-producer), talked at length about the political heart of the show.

Chadwick said their politics begin with their belief that “the majority of women prisoners are not a threat to society. The majority have had abused lives and have insufficient education, and would benefit far more from education and work assistance, which would be a much better use of public money.”

Of course, even with this political underpinning, the musical is not, as Helen Stewart might say, an entirely “seeerrious” affair.

“If you were just going to do a piece that was a musical about the state of women’s imprisonment, it would not be a fun night out,” said Gotts. “It would be a very dark piece, in a fringe venue. It wouldn’t be on in the West End. We can promote that agenda, but at the same time, it’s not Prison: The Musical, it’s Bad Girls: The Musical, and Bad Girls has always been a mixture of things. It’s entertainment with a little bit of social issues thrown in, and that is its starting point.”

For those who want to learn more about how to help female inmates, nonprofits abound, from Stop Prisoner Rape to Women in Prison, and the Bad Girls: The Musical program features insightful articles by a professor of criminology and the director of the U.K.’s Prison Reform Trust. Just don’t expect the musical to be as politically outspoken as its writers or as direct as the essays in the program.

“If someone thinks they’ve had a camp night out and it’s all been jolly good fun, our hope is that they might buy a program and read that on the way home, and it might lead them to think about the show a little differently,” said Gotts. “You laugh along the way, and then you get a little slap at the end of it.”

The “camp night out” begins shortly after the prisoners leave the stage following their opening number. Jim Fenner, the much-loathed prison officer from the TV series, slithers onstage to sing his first song, “Jailcraft,” with his leading lady, a sniveling, hard-hearted and (later) tap-dancing Bodybag:

And if the powers that be Are just too blind to see I know a thing or two I’ll pull a string or two Take a lesson from me

Fenner and Bodybag are a most loathsome and yet undeniably charming duo, and their self-congratulatory lyrics (“God we’re beautiful,” Bodybag sings at one point) drew loud laughs from the audience at the gala, and earned the actors the shared next-to-last bow at the end of the show.

The final bow belonged to Sally Dexter, a West End veteran who plays Yvonne Atkins, a character Chadwick described as “a supernatural force.” She certainly enters with a bang, glibly telling Bodybag she has “just popped in for a quick four years,” before doling out drinks stashed in her overcoat to prisoners who are soon envisioning an A-list party behind bars:

I’m gonna be the party queen Giving it up all night Cruising and schmoozing with the best. Take a look around this exclusive scene So much flesh to be pressed Oh yes

Yvonne’s and the other prisoners’ fantasies are immediately contrasted with Fenner’s sinister ruminations on the “mutual service” he provides to inmates like Dockley and Hicks:

Frankly it’s just irresponsible if I don’t try To provide What they lack Here inside Everyone’s up for the ride, so Who could accuse me If they choose to use me?

The juxtaposition of the serious and the ridiculous – often within the same song or scene – has been an integral part of Bad Girls from its inception. It’s a style that many poison-penned British critics have widely panned as indecision. The Independent, for instance, declared that the tone of the musical “is wildly inconsistent: spoof Broadway razzle-dazzle cheek-by-jowl with unbelievably banal romantic ballads; the tongue-in-cheek smack up against the hand-on-heart.”

Chadwick has always insisted their style is, in fact, true to the characters and the prison environment. “That kind of emotional multitasking is a reflection of what life’s like in a women’s prison,” she explained. “There’s a great camaraderie among women in prison, and that spirit, where things can go from tragic to hilarious, is part of the reality.”

“It’s what women are like,” added Gotts, “but it’s a little different in the musical [compared to the TV show]. There’s a higher percentage of comedy in the musical, obviously, but the combination is still there. It’s probably a reverse ratio, whereas [on TV] you had seriousness leveled by humor, we now have humor leveled by seriousness.”

Something else may be behind the criticism leveled at both the stage and screen versions of Bad Girls: a snobbish, sexist assumption that these women writers and creators have accidentally mashed together the show’s contrasting styles.

Gotts said: “There’s always been something with Bad Girls because it’s about working-class women – women! – and it’s by women writers, and it blends comedy and serious … people very often don’t get the fact that’s intentional. They think – do the writers know? Yes, of course we bloody do! People don’t trust the fact that we do know it does different things. It’s not something we haven’t spotted.”

It’s difficult to miss the contrasting styles in Act II, which opens with Crystal’s touching lament, “Freedom Road,” and segues into the aforementioned tap-dancing Bodybag during a fantasy number with Fenner called “The Future Is Bright.” That laugh-out-loud showstopper (think top-hats, canes and inmates dressed as showgirls) is abruptly followed by an emotional phone call from Julie S. to her son – a scene Jones admitted brought tears to her eyes.

I’ll be there like a mother should be So you can follow your dreams Yes, things will get better Wait and see We’ll work it now Just you and me … ‘Cos I don’t ever, ever want to be – So sorry …

Again.

Of course, in the midst of all these other pairings – Bodybag and Fenner, Shell and Denny, the two Julies – there is another pair in the musical, an iconic couple named Nikki and Helen that lesbians around the world have identified with and cared about, often fanatically and sometimes obsessively, for more than half a decade. Nikki and Helen share precious little stage time in the musical. Within its 2.5-hour confines, the show suggests only the bare outline of their story, touching on their forbidden attraction and shared disgust with the prison system.

Gotts explained: “It’s not all about those characters because – although for us obviously we were very much keen on the Helen and Nikki relationship – for an awful lot of people and an awful lot of our ordinary Bad Girls fans, it was something great and something they took on board and rooted for, but that’s not why they were watching. It was one piece of the ensemble.”

In their only big number, “Every Night,” Nikki and Helen share a split-stage, as Nikki sings from her prison bed:

Why does she do this to me? How did I let her in? When I know so well – I should beware

And a lonely Helen, played by Laura Rogers, responds from her couch:

Why does she do this to me? How can I ever win? And though I tell myself I don’t care She’s always there …

Nikki and Helen’s physical contact is limited to a touch on the shoulder and a three- or four-second final kiss that the Evening Standard called “discreet”; a reviewer for WhatsOnStage.com somehow missed the lesbian romance entirely and described Nikki and Helen’s relationship as a “burgeoning friendship.” Given their limited stage time, the most subversive aspect of the lesbian relationship between Helen and Nikki is not its intensity or the extent of its exploration but rather the fact their romance contains none of the humor, camp or chorus lines seen in the rest of the musical. Gotts noted that their relationship is, ironically, the only one that is “played straight,” and it is intended to be the “coat hanger in the piece that other things are structured around.”

Although they’ve received positive feedback from many lesbian fans, Gotts and Chadwick are aware that others may leave the theater feeling shunted aside in much the same way Jones was on her way into the theater.

Regardless of the potential criticism, the women behind the show are sticking to their “subversion by seduction” ways. The musical, like the TV drama, is intended to be a Trojan horse of sorts, sneaking inside the walls of mainstream homes where it can unleash its social and political messages, including that women’s love for each other can be so beautiful and inspiring and profound that it deserves to be cheered.

“I’m less interested in entertaining lesbians than actually thinking that a whole lot of straight people who’ve never thought about it, Mr. and Mrs. Normal, can sit there rooting for that relationship and actually, hopefully, not squirm at the end when Helen and Nikki get together,” said Gotts. “I’m much more excited about having a whole load of heterosexual girls coming to see the show and thinking, ‘Oh no, it’s right they got together in the end, I wanted them to be together.'”

Along with being part of the creators’ philosophy, appealing to mainstream audiences is essential for the musical’s financial success. Like its televised predecessor, the musical is independently produced, with a significant portion of the private financing coming from gays and lesbians – what Brits call the “pink pound.”

Gotts said the musical, like most, is an “extremely risky investment,” one that cannot afford to be in what she called the ghetto of the “little lesbian musical.”

Gotts added: “What makes me excited is that the Helen and Nikki story is in the West End, and it’s being enjoyed by an extremely wide audience. Our desire is to subvert the wider audience by including the lesbian story line, rather than it being a musical with a lesbian story line for lesbians.”

And so it is that Nikki and Helen’s final kiss is all but forgotten in the midst of Yvonne’s happy ending and Fenner’s final comeuppance, and the actors playing Nikki and Helen exit quietly, sharing not the final bow but one of the last few. That’s why, for many lesbian fans, watching Nikki and Helen take the stage in a major West End production – one that is written, created and financially supported by lesbians – may bring both pride in the achievement and disappointment in the outcome.

Attendance is going up, indicating that mainstream audiences have accepted Nikki and Helen’s romance as one of the musical’s many story lines. But then, acceptance of lesbians as merely part of the show is a victory that’s already been won – on TV, in films and on the stage.

The televised version of Bad Girls was groundbreaking because it dared to push its genre forward, placing a lesbian romance front and center, and sizzling through a slow burn that lasted three satisfying seasons. Like the TV show, the musical seduces mainstream audiences, but it doesn’t challenge them with something new, something more powerful and nuanced than what, in musical history, has already been accomplished in shows like Rent and The Color Purple.

Instead, Bad Girls: The Musical appeals to its mainstream audiences with a bawdy, funny, brash and entertaining show.

It is, in the end, much of what a musical should be – and, in its depiction of Nikki and Helen, far less than it could have been.