"Our House". Oxford Playhouse
You might think that, with Guys and Dolls in full swing at Queen’s College, there wouldn’t be enough dancing, singing, saxophoning students left to fill another musical in the same week. You’d be wrong. The stage of the Oxford Playhouse is thronging with yet another talented company of performers as they blast their way through the Madness jukebox musical Our House . Our House came out in 2003, when every vintage band from the 80s had to have a musical based on their greatest hits just to keep up with the Bennys and Björns. But where Mamma Mia transports Abba’s music far from Sweden, and exploits the full range of their output, from ballad to disco, Our House is a morality tale from the streets of Camden, the (literal) stomping ground of Suggs and his merry men. And it embraces the fact that most of Madness’s music was high-octane ska. The plot follows a London likely lad, Joe Casey (played by first-year undergraduate Alex Innes) who gets into scrapes with the local crime lords, f...