Bringing FRIENDS! The Musical Parody to the stage
You can't decide to go viral. You can't make it happen. You've just got to hope that it will.
And it certainly has done with the latest show from producer Matthew Gale, son of the hugely-respected former CFT artistic director (1985-1989) John Gale.
The show is FRIENDS! The Musical Parody which heads to the Mayflower Theatre, Southampton from January 6-10.
“We opened in Nottingham and then the second week we were in Sunderland, and two different individuals videoed the curtain call. On Instagram the videos got 15 and a half million hits in a matter of days, and the box office went crazy!”
The show offers a chance to join Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe as they navigate love, friendship and life's ups and downs in 1990s New York City.
“We were wanting to do it as a big title,” Matthew says, “but we also thought that it was a show that we could turn into a great show. As Cameron says, the devil is in the detail. We don't want just do this for one tour. We want to take our version around the world. It will probably go to America and then come back here in two years’ time. We want that longevity.”
And going viral was a great start: “It's very hard. It's just not something that you can do on purpose. But we have! We didn't do it ourselves but two members of public did it for us and it's been great for getting young audiences in. You need to sustain audiences over the years and you need to get young people in.”
It all touches on a great nostalgia for the original TV show: “The cast were amazing and they did something very clever. They collectively negotiated and they landed $1,000,000 an episode each. But the reason the show was so big was that it was all about creating a family from your friends. It was a time in the 90s when the nuclear family had changed. There were lots of single parents, and the show was about a group of six friends that became family, and I think that's why it had the popularity that it had.”
And the popularity has continued: “My daughter who is 30 knows every word of every episode and she wasn't even there. She was just a toddler at the time, but the show's got such universal appeal that people have just loved it.
“It has dated in some ways. It does not have gay people and it does not have black people and we looked at it and we thought what can we do about it. And I went to see the show Why Am I So Single? which was written by the people who wrote Six. In the show, they talk about Friends a lot. The fact is that there is a whole generation that never saw the original when it was on television but still find something very comforting about it.
“It would be very different now if it were made now. You'd have to change it but the parody is taking the p*** and it is doing it very fondly. It started in New York as an off-Broadway show and frankly it was not great. We did a lot of rearranging and rethinking of it. We spent four and a half months casting it and spent a lot of money on wigs and make-up so that they really, really do look like the originals, and that has made a massive difference. And it's just a lot of fun. It's not deep and intellectual but it is fun – and it is also about creating new audiences and that's what it is doing.”