EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN at Jermyn Street Theatre 23 July - 10 August 2025

‘Offbeat, entertaining musical comedy with its tongue firmly in its cheek ’★★★★

Light as a souffle, nutritious as a strawberry, ‘Extraordinary Women’ is an offbeat, entertaining musical comedy with its tongue very firmly in its cheek. To the windswept island of Sirene in the inter-war years come a group of extraordinary women in the hope of a world (almost) without men. We’re in a world of cocktails, dances and surreptitious glances, moonlight, romance and falling in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with.

Little do the women know they’ve been conjured there by the siren Parthenope, with a little help from her sister sirens and the poet Sappho, to make the island safe for Partenope in a plot outside the plot that adds up to not much and matters less as it acts as a peg for a series of scenes that operate almost as sketches backed by entertaining and witty songs superbly sung by a cast of seven.

Among the seven-strong cast playing 17 characters, Aurora (Caroline Sheen) is the host for a party on this isolated island, to which come her friend and faithless lover Rosalba (Amy Ellen Richardson), who’s roving eye and beauty make her a magnet for all the other guests bar the five manservants, policemen, soldiers etc played by Jack Butterworth, and a prim English governess (Sophie Louise Dann) who might, but for convention, be just as interested as the rest of them.

The performances are uniformly high standard, with Richardson giving Rosalba the full Dietrich and Butterworth flitting beautifully from confused copper to long-suffering manservant to fabulously untrustworthy playboy.  Monique Young is particularly strong as Parthenope, holding the thing together, but also a buttoned-up Russian woman and criminally flighty American belle. Jasmine Kerr’s ingenue Lulu and Amira Matthews combining Sappho (her poetry’s so fragmentary – an idea of the level of the jokes, there) and an American singer and diva.

It's all highly entertaining, and there’s joy to be had from seeing the sheer talent of the six women and single man as they combine, most playing multiple roles, each singing solos, duets and ensemble pieces backed by an excellent two-piece piano and guitar/bass section.

The plot doesn’t add up to much and the musical has no deep and passing message for the world – affairs begin, end, order is restored or not – but taken simply as series of set pieces, it’s an entirely pleasing show. It’s drawn from a little-remembered novel by Sir Compton MacKenzie of ‘Whisky Galore’ and ‘Monarch of the Glen’ fame, this one a roman a clef about lightly, indeed barely, disguised lesbian literary figures he knew in the 1920s, turned into a musical only within the last five years. And, as so often, at Jermyn Street, it offers the opportunity to see gifted performers really close up in a west end musical.

Photography: Steve Gregson

EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN

Music by Sarah Travis, and book and lyrics by Richard Stirling, from the novel by Sir Compton Mackenzie

Directed by Paul Foster

Jermyn Street Theatre 23 July to 10 August 2025

Box Office: https://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/extraordinary-women-a-new-musical-of-the-1920s/

Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London).