Military Wives: The Musical review – joyful choir find strength through song

In writer-director Debbie Isitt’s new musical, the women of the title are surrounded by cardboard boxes. As Katie Lias’s set design makes clear, these are precarious lives, regularly packed up and moved from one military base to the next. The promise of the Military Wives Choirs – originated up the road from York Theatre Royal at Catterick Garrison and the subject of a BBC documentary and subsequent film from which this show takes inspiration – is that they offer connection in a rootless existence.

Life-and-death stakes faced by their partners … Military Wives at York Theatre Royal. Photograph: Danny With A Camera

While based on the true story and hitting some of the same plot beats as Peter Cattaneo’s 2019 film, Isitt’s version has its own cast of fictional characters. The show quickly introduces us to a disparate group of women who are brought together when upbeat outsider Olive arrives to form a singing group for the wives while their partners are on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Though it sacrifices the emotional heft of the movie’s central partnership, this take on the material adopts a fittingly ensemble approach, illustrating the power of community at the story’s heart.

Isitt’s storytelling is propulsive and pacy, if somewhat reliant on contrivance and soapy tropes. Each of the women in the choir has her own emotionally loaded subplot – a baby on the way, a round of IVF, a struggling marriage – most of which are quickly and easily resolved (usually with a tear-jerking ballad thrown in). The more striking and moving moments arrive when frontline conflict explodes into the choir’s rehearsal room, theatrically juxtaposing the two worlds these women straddle and reminding us of the life-and-death stakes faced by their partners.

The show is transparent in its pressing of emotional buttons, engineering moments of high drama that just as rapidly melt away again, while its comic rhythms start to become predictable. But what comes across most convincingly is the sheer joy found in singing together. Performing a score of familiar pop, rock and Motown hits, the excellent cast bring an infectious energy to this material, lifting the sometimes cliched script and connecting with a story that has deep local resonances.

• At York Theatre Royal until 27 September