There’s no scrimping on hairspray at Truvy’s. Her beauty shop is the most successful shop in town, with one philosophy at its core: “There is no such thing as natural beauty”. Read more …
Steel Magnolias is the beloved account of the lives of six close-knit, gutsy Southern women living in small-town 80s America. The story revolves around Truvy’s beauty shop, where the women regularly meet, sharing everything: laughter, gossip, their aspirations and their dreams.
A classic film of the late 1980s starring Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts Steel Magnolias was originally written by Roger Harling for his sister and was first staged in New York in 1987.
With a superbly witty script, Steel Magnolias is as hilarious as it is touching.
Rippling with sitcom gags and bold characterisations, and boasting the talents of the doyenne of Scottish popular theatre Barbara Rafferty, Levick has created a production which does exactly what it says on the hairspray tin.
Jemima Levick's faithful, funny and at moments quietly moving production.
There’s a feeling that 25 years on, it might have been possible to achieve a wittier and more challenging perspective on Harling’s play, and on the decade that inspired it; the kind of perspective that is present in that ironic gallery of haircut pictures, but sadly absent from a well-crafted but soft-edged evening at the Rep.
Slight and insipid.
Jemima Levick on Steel Magnolias revival
Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee from Wednesday February 22, 2012, until Saturday March 10, 2012. More info: www.dundeereptheatre.co.uk
RSS feed of Theatre reviews