Review: An Officer and a Gentleman at Liverpool Empire ***

If you were asked to nominate a classic cinematic moment from the 1980s, what would you choose?

Nobody putting Baby in the corner at Kellerman’s perhaps? Or Ferris Bueller twisting and shouting in downtown Chicago? Kevin Bacon throwing shapes in Footloose, the marauding marshmallow man in Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones trying to outrun a giant rock? Or Sally giving Harry a life lesson at the diner?

Or you might of course plump for THAT scene where Richard Gere’s Zack Mayo, fresh from graduating Navy pilot school and dashing all in white, arrives at a Pensacola paper plant to lift his on-off girlfriend Paula literally from the factory floor and transport her to a place ‘where eagles fly’.

It’s certainly the moment you can sense the audience anticipating pretty much all the way through this touring stage musical version of An Officer and a Gentleman, returning to the Empire for the first time in six years.

But despite that crowd-pleasing ‘fairytale’ finale, An Officer and a Gentleman is not actually a fluffy, feelgood rom-com. At its heart are personal stories of quiet desperation, of the desire to escape and seek something better, of working for the common good and, finally, of acceptance of yourself and others.

A challenge, certainly, to encapsulate in an all-singing, all-dancing express train of a musical dominated by a smorgasbord of 80s tracks, and one that is only partially met – mostly thanks to some thoughtful performances from the show’s lead actors.

Above: The navy pilot hopefuls are put through their paces. Top: Zack Mayo (Luke Baker) and Paula Pokrifki (Georgia Lennon). Photos by Marc Brenner.

The United States Naval Aviation Training facility is where America’s generations of waterborne ‘top guns’ are knocked into shape during a physically and mentally gruelling 13-week course (less Top Gun more Fame) presided over by the exacting gunnery sergeant Emil Foley (nicely embodied by Lukin Simmonds on press night).

Into Foley’s realm comes an assortment of unlikely candidates – among them Luke Baker’s prickly loner Zack Mayo, a navy brat with a troubled family backstory, and Admiral’s son Sid Worley (Paul French) whose seemingly smooth certainty and laidback mid-Western demeanour hides similarly troubled depths.

Zack and Sid both soon find themselves within the sights not just of Sgt Foley but also of two local girls, Paula (Georgia Lennon) and Lynette (Sinead Long) who are longing, for different reasons and with different approaches, to escape their small-town life.

The action – on base and off - unfolds amid a succession of 80s pop and ballads which at times threaten to stifle the narrative flow, certainly in the first half. Weeding out the more tenuous or perfunctory (what does St Elmo’s Fire really bring to the party?) would allow the plot to breathe better as well as carving 10 or 15 minutes from the capacious two-and-a-half hour running time.

Europe’s The Final Countdown, coming as it does hot on the heels of the story’s most shocking moment, seems somewhat insensitive!

Above: Aunt Bunny (Wendi Harriott), Esther (Melanie Masson), Paula (Georgia Lennon) and Lynette (Sinead Long). Photo by Marc Brenner.

Meanwhile it’s a Marmite move to deliver Kim Wilde’s Kids in America with deliberate, antagonistic dissonance to underscore the scene it appears in.

Saying all that, the cast –uniformly fine singers – deliver the best numbers with power and conviction, not least Melanie Masson as Paula’s mother Esther who repurposes James Brown’s This is a Man’s Man’s Man’s World as a bravura feminist protest song and then later delivers Helen Reddy’s 1970s call to arms – I Am Woman – alongside Lennon and with equal passion.

Away from the music, French works hard to breach the show’s surface flash and to flesh out his character’s unsettling and upsetting narrative arc.

And while Baker has perhaps the trickiest job with Gere a constant spectre at the feast, he forges his own path as the troubled, introverted Zack.

The audience is certainly on his side – and he rewards them by lifting them up along with Paula during the show’s much-anticipated, heart-warming final scene.