Get Up, Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical

The jukebox bio-musical is a genre best approached with caution. So it’s a relief to report that this new show about the life of the great Bob Marley, father of reggae, Rastafari prophet and preacher of one love, does justice to its subject. And seeing as the man himself was heavily influenced by time spent living in London, where he recorded the seminal album Exodus in the mid-1970s, it also feels strangely like a homecoming.

As scripted by Lee Hall, the show takes a while to work its magic. The first half is scrappy and formulaic, playing on the usual rags-to-riches tropes. But the second is joyful and full of heart, as it tells the story of Marley’s political activism and cancer diagnosis with intelligence and sensitivity.

The evening begins, after some preliminary patter from DJ Moses (Daniel Bailey), with a roof-raising rendition of Lively Up Yourself, played in front of designer Chloe Lamford’s stack of speakers, an homage to Jamaican sound systems. Marley’s early life is rattled through: abandoned by his black mother and white father, he lands up jamming with the Wailers on the streets of Trenchtown. After a famous meeting with London-based record producer Chris Blackwell, the band are soon rocketing up the charts and Marley himself becomes, in the words of the CIA who monitored him, a "Black messiah".

Clint Dyer’s production sometimes struggles when it tries too hard to be a musical; it’s at its best when it lets the music speak for itself. As with many jukebox shows, it’s a pity that certain songs are given relatively short shrift; we get only a snippet of Stir It Up, for example, as Marley meets his wife Rita in a rough Kingston club. Other songs get the full concert treatment – Jamming, One Love, Get Up, Stand Up – and they’re wonderful reminders of Marley’s genius.

This is thanks, in large part, to Arinzé Kene, who gives a towering performance in the central role. He has all the required charisma and then some, from the moment he first introduces the cast (a nice meta device) to an utterly spine-tingling performance of Redemption Song, to a climactic, euphoric rendition of the title number that duly gets us on our feet.

It’s Gabrielle Brooks as Rita who provides the evening with its show-stopping moment; in a neat reversal she sings No Woman, No Cry to her husband in admonishment of his womanising, epitomised by his relationship with Miss Jamaica Cindy Breakspeare (another standout performance, from Shanay Holmes). It richly deserved the ovation that followed.

The whole thing sounds fantastic, with musical director Sean Green and band capturing that rich reggae rhythm. And, much like Marley himself, it all brims with a sort of unbridled charm that makes you believe, just for a moment, that everything really is going to be all right.