Carrie Hope Fletcher is a star on perpetual rise. An Open Book showcases an abundantly talented performer at the top of her game.
📍 Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 Sun 4 Jun 2023
🕖 Evening 7.30pm
🕖 Running time: Approx 2 hours 30 minutes (with one interval)
🎬 Director: Ruthie Stevens
🎼 MD: Ben Van Tienen
🎂 8+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Audio Induction Loop
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you need no introduction to Carrie Hope Fletcher. One of the leading lights of her generation in West End Musical Theatre, a successful vlogger, and author, it’s safe to say her light is well and truly out from under any nearby bushels.
A hybrid show & concert, An Open Book combines a programme of songs plucked from her illustrious stage career with personal anecdote, and couches them inside something resembling a one-woman musical. The relaxed, book strewn setting complete with sofa and desk represent Carrie’s mind, or at least the part concerned with show business. The audience, invited inside helps select the tales she will tell via a website reached by the QR code printed in the souvenir programmes. Options include ‘A Saucy Scoop’, ‘A Bitter Sweet Anecdote’ and ‘A Teenage Obsession.’
This approach allows Hope Fletcher to blend her abundant talents as an actress, chanteuse, and lifestyle sharing media star, though it can feel a tad contrived at times. Nonetheless there’s an unquestionable polish to the entire affair, Carrie’s powerful, nuanced vocals backed by a tight, dynamic on-stage quintet led by the show’s Musical Director Ben Van Tienen. There’s no needless clutter on stage, giving Carrie freedom to travel the stage, and bring new life to the character’s she’s made a career from vivifying.
This isn’t warts and all storytelling, the stories being PG at most, and redacted where necessary to avoid the blushes of other professionals if involved. That anonymity is only waved when discussing her ‘disgustingly talented’ older brother Tom (of McFly), and his utter domestic ineptitude and failures as a babysitter.
The songs, some associated with the audience selected tales – and therefore in optional in theory – range through Hope Fletcher’s iconic past roles and beyond. From ‘I say no’ the song she debuted in the original London cast of Heathers the Musical, through a Les Mis mash-up of Eponine’s ‘On My Own with Javert’s ‘Stars’, to ‘The Age of Unbelieving’ plucked from her time as Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the songbook is truly open.
The show’s title track, reprised at intervals, ‘Another Chapter’ is more than fitting for this book-themed adventure, plucked from Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson’s short lived ‘Between the Lines’, and given fresh, big ballad life. There’s even time to reprise her teenage idol’s My Chemical Romance’s ‘I’m not Okay’, replete with devil’s horn hand sign, and bestriped hoody.
There’s something for everybody in this show, and everything in An Open Book is likely for the majority of her packed, nakedly adoring audience. For make no mistake, An Open Book doesn’t really need critics to write about it, the feeling in the auditorium transcends admiration to skirt upon worship. It would take quite the odious performance for a standing, rapturous ovation to be anything less than inevitable. Fortunately, Hope Fletcher is in fine fettle, a very likeable presence on stage armed with abundant talent. The ovation is deserved.
A few words now in praise of support act Trinity, the trio of Irish singers: Emmett O’Hanlon, Ronan Scolard, and Conoor Murphy. Think Celtic Il Divo, and you’re not a million miles away, their material ranging from the presumably mandatory ‘Danny Boy,’ through the Shenandoah river-basin, and into the Greatest Showman. Personable, and crowd-pleasing, one hopes they got their dinner-suits back to the hire shop on time. The sound design for the main show didn’t quite capture their full vocal capabilities, though the imperfections may only be evident to the most persnickety (ie theatre critics).
If Trinity are ever fortunate enough to generate the buzz of overwhelming joy attending their main act’s intermission, they can count themselves very fortunate. If they can conjure such a tidal swell of affectionate adulation when the final curtain falls upon Carrie Hope Fletcher, their careers will be truly blessed. At only 30, one wonders what heights this stage powerhouse will have scaled before she makes another welcome outside of London.
Carrie Hope Fletcher: An Open Book played the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on June 4th 2023. It is a Lambert Jackson production with Cuffe and Taylor, and Live Nation.
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