A fantastically talented cast and musicians take you inside a 1960s time warp, an era that offered whiplashing changes in fashion, music, culture and pathos, all from a female perspective. “Beehive: The ‘60s Musical” begins with a conventional start to the year 1960 that quickly becomes a Slip ’N Slide through the history of civil rights, assassinations, freewheeling love and even Woodstock. Having been a child in the Sixties, I was a vicarious observer of much of that landscape and a minor participant in the dance crazes, but the wave of nostalgia that swept through an audience of all ages was palpable in this production.
This was largely due to the lyrical storytelling done with perfection by the ensemble cast of powerhouse women at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire in . In many ways, the show was reminiscent of “Jersey Boys,” but did not fall neatly into a category of jukebox musicals. The lines that wove the songs together to tell a story of the history surrounding the artistry were clever, sentimental and strong.
Before you could wax lyrical on any particular part, the cast had you off to the races in, dare I say, a hive of activity. While almost every single song is one you would’ve heard in its time or still playing on the radio to this day, the careful selection of up-tempo versus ballad was masterful and with a clever eye to pacing for the sake of the actors and the audience. This is a 90-minute show with no intermission, which imparts the feel of a conc.