As economists will tell you, if you want to get money circulating, there is no point handing it to the rich. They will just add it to their savings. Give it to the poor, on the other hand, and it will be put to good use. They will go out and spend it.
Look at Viv Nicholson. Before she and her husband, Keith, won more than £150,000 on the football pools, they had next to nothing. When, in 1961, their score draws came in, they enjoyed every penny of their cash prize. Their lavish spending took them from a Castleford mining community to a life of big cars, fancy holidays and snooty neighbours.
Written by Justin Greene and the late Steve Brown, Spend Spend Spend charts Nicholson’s journey from rags to riches and back to rags. It aspires to be a Faustian morality tale about a working-class woman who sells her soul for a better life. Lacking the material for anything quite so weighty, it settles for the message of Can’t Buy Me Love. Nicholson’s spending spree is tremendous fun until it is not. The money brings her more grief than happiness.
For all its West End success, it is an uneven musical. The first half is slow to take off and dwells on incidental details: it is moderately interesting to know Nicholson sold ice-creams in a cinema, but not enough to justify a whole song. The second half is where the big transformations take place, but it is also episodic, as it ticks off the events of a real-life story regardless of dramatic value.
All the same, the rhyme-heavy songs are catchy, giving plenty of opportunity for punchy choral routines. The director, Josh Seymour, makes the most of the theatre’s in-the-round staging by presenting Spend Spend Spend as a dream play. Scenes fade in and out like memories on a set by Grace Smart that sparkles with the false promise of silver and gold.
Performing a moving duet in Who’s Gonna Love Me?, Rachel Leskovac is a rooted narrator, looking back at Rose Galbraith as her younger self, convincingly going from ordinary girl next door to worldly wise widow.
• At Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester, until 11 January
