Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story – Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Week 3 of a 40-week tour of the UK, the long-running musical Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story, lands at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. The multi award winning globe-trotting show, first performed in 1989, has clocked up an impressive 10,000+ performances in the UK, putting it firmly in the top 10 of UK musicals and can fairly promote itself as the forerunner of the now very popular Juke Box musical.
Typical of this style of musical, the script and acting play very much second fiddle to the music, which to be fair is practically non-stop. The story, what there is of it, by Alan Janes, focuses on the last 18 months, between 1957 and 1959, of Charles Hardin Holley’s, too short 22 years. The script could do with a reboot and the delivery is patchy, but gratefully, the music is never far away....