https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/standing-at-the-skys-edge-national-theatre-review-richard-hawley-chris-bush-sheffield-b1060115.html

Whod have guessed a musical about Sheffields brutalist Park Hill housing estate could be so uplifting? Playwright Chris Bush has worked the stirring earworms of her fellow native, the much-feted singer-songwriter Richard Hawley, into a beguiling triple narrative covering the developments utopian postwar conception, its demise in the Eighties and its 21st century yuppie rebirth.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/standing-skys-edge-national-theatre-review-concept-trumps-content/

For years Sheffield's brutalist Park Hill estate was famous for a piece of graffiti, I love you, will u marry me, sprayed along a concrete walkway. During the estate's redevelopment into duplex flats, the graffiti was replaced with a neon sign, less in tribute to its author than as a cynical marketing tool aimed at the estate's wealthy new buyers. In fact the marriage never took place (the story is a tragic one) and the sign, a shiny hollow version of its former hopeful self, has become an apt metaphor for Park Hill itself and for 1960s working class estates everywhere.

This newish musical, which premiered at Sheffield Crucible in 2019 harnesses this mood of romantic disenchantment through the stories of three households who occupy the same Park Hill flat across the estate's 60 year life span (the graffiti slogan ominously winks out from Ben Stones's terrific concrete set). 

In 1960, libidinous newlyweds Rose and steel worker Harry take ownership high on a spirit of post-war optimism. Two decades later, the once pristine walls now squeaking with rats, they are replaced by the fearful family of Liberian immigrant Joy (an outstanding Faith Omole); and in 2015 by Poppy who is precisely the sort of Ottolenghi-obsessed middle class Londoner the refurbished estate is now for. Their lives, in Chris Bush's deftly structured script, are layered together like onion skins, each always visible beneath the others. Thematically, too, their stories reverberate off each other, buffeted by upheaval, loss and politics: the collapse of the steel industry; gentrification. 

What's more, Sheffield crooner Richard Hawley provides the soundtrack; his velveteen torch songs (a mix of old and newly commissioned material, and performed by a band wittily housed on set in a top floor flat) the soaring sound of post industrial dream-fuelled yearning. Yet this often lovely piece of theatre also falls short of its own ambition. The songs seem to float free of the action, there not to further the story but to provide a generalised sonic mood board. Bush's script, though marinated in the history of Sheffield, is compromised by its desire to simultaneously serve as a potted history of modern Britain. 

Ultimately, Robert Hastie's superbly acted production is most effective as a series of beautifully choreographed tableaux. It's gorgeous to look at and moving to witness, but like that neon sign, the concept trumps the content.