(seen at the afternoon performance on 25th November 2025)
In 1985 Sheffield, Ros Wollen, Annette Williams and Roz Wall qualified as car mechanics. With both sexism and mass unemployment against them, they opened Gwenda’s Garage, a car repair workshop named for racing driver Gwenda Stewart.
40 years on, Val Regan, Nicky Hallett and Sheffield Theatres pay tribute in this musical show.
Opening with the admission that some recollections are hazy, others fictional, but all mostly true, set designer Sarah Booth has them slot car panels onto a wire frame as a history of women doing everything for themselves unfolds.
Rather like the car they are constructing, the show is a lot of panels hanging together, some fitting perfectly, others flapping a little but with the potential to blend into a useful whole.
Starting with the best, Val Regan comes up with “Family of One” for Terry (Sia Kiwa), a song of her enforced independence which any musical theatre school auditionee needs to learn, pronto. It’ll get them in, no trouble, and Kiwa shows us all how it needs to be sung.
Almost as good, “I’m Learning” (lyrics this time by Nicky Hallett) is practically a pastiche tribute to “Ring of Keys” from “Fun Home” and covers the same ground. Married woman Feona (Georgina Coram) discovering her lesbian self, a strong performance with dashes of humour and a little life philosophy.
The rest of the music and lyric are seldom less than serviceable. An oddity is an opera-like need to repeat certain lines, the writers imagining that – as in opera – it gives emphasis. In fact, jarring in musical theatre.
Combined with many hanging non-sequiturs, we are often left with a feeling of hearing incomplete thoughts. Distracting – our attention is on what we think we might have missed, but have not.
For some reason, the creators also feel the need to augment the original trio of hard-working and resilient women with two bolted on characters and obviously fictional plots.
While Coram’s Guildford Feona (“we all speak like that in Guildford” getting the biggest laugh of the night) is merely a little odd, anarchic apprentice Dipstick (Lucy Mackay) is in danger of unbalancing the work entirely.
Nothing wrong with Mackay’s performance. In fact, she does reactive comedy at TV sitcom level and would be a boon to any who cast her in one. It is just that we want to know a lot more about the garage itself and it is hard to believe in anarchic protest, particularly as the finale is a polite council-funded-then-not (bigotry in action) fundraising show.
It also means there is no time for us to truly get to know Carol (Eva Scott), practical leader and only granted one explanatory song late in the show. More to give and we don’t receive it.
Bev (Nancy Brabin-Platt) gains sympathy as a foster parent suffering more discrimination when her sexuality comes to light. Brabin-Platt plays well with out emotions in the final outcome. A subplot which could be developed further.
With a note too for versatile Liz Kitchen, going through uniforms to give us a host of extra people, director Jelena Budimir does well to keep the large space filled continuously.
The major questions are firstly the show’s length. While including the politics of the time is fine, the Commons sequence is a little long and unfocussed, and the BBC News invasion confusing for those who did not know of it.
As fascinating as the history of the whole women and gay rights movement is, the sudden scaling from telling a local story to national contexts is disconcerting. It leads to much of the first half having little plotting, the second cramming it in.
The show also ends in a rather over-extended finale, with at least three points feeling like they are an end for applause, but turning out not to be.
From the same stable as brilliant “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” and the sublime “Standing At The Sky’s Edge,” this is not yet in that class, but has the potential to be so. Tap their creators and revise it, and there is the possibility of yet another Sheffield musical able to expand our perspectives of the world.
3 stars.
Photo credit: Chris Saunders.