Stage review: The Winner Takes it All

The crowd got two shows for the price of one with this double bill of two tribute bands whose previous visits to the Grand have proved to be a massive draw for those who cherish the music of the 1970s – too often derided as the decade that style forgot.

Quite whether the show works as a double bill is open to question (in the past, the bands have appeared singly): the first half was devoted to Jive Talkin', a Bee Gees tribute group featuring Darren Simmons and his brother Gary as Barry and Robin Gibb with Jarrod Loughlin as Maurice, while the second set saw Abba tribute act Voulez Vous taking to the stage with a selection of hits made famous by the Scandinavian supergroup.

The Bee Gees section included numbers from Saturday Night Fever, Tragedy and Islands in the stream, as well as older numbers such as Words, Massachusetts and In the Morning of My Life (which was used

for a series of Texaco TV ads in the 1960s – not a lot of people know that). The problem was that in some instances they were woefully out of tune, with the higher notes in particular falling some way short of their target.

The Abba segment was a vast improvement, with an all-new Voulez Vous line-up performing kitsch classics including Waterloo, SOS, Honey Honey, Fernando and – inevitably – Mamma Mia.

Squeezing two shows into one meant the omission of some fondly remembered hits (where, for example, was the Bee Gees' disco anthem You Should Be Dancing?) and the slight imbalance between the vocals and instrumental music rendered some lines incomprehensible, but the audience was out for a good time and this is exactly what they got.

Purists may pooh-pooh the notion of staging events such as this at the Grand, but it is exactly this kind of show which attracts audiences in their droves and keeps the Box Office tills jingling. The Grand does indeed offer something for everyone in its varied programme, and if the reaction of the crowd to this one was anything to go by, it is a policy which will continue to reap rewards for decades to come.

Graham Williams

The Winner Takes it All was at Swansea Grand Theatre.