‘I Should Be So Lucky’ – the long-awaited Stock Aitken Waterman jukebox musical – will get its world premiere in January 2024.
Named after Kylie Minogue’s chart-topping single of the same name, the show – which includes 10 No. 1 singles and over 30 songs – will debut at Southampton’s Mayflower Theatre on January 24, per a listing on the venue’s website.
A synopsis of the show, also set to feature music from Bananarama, Jason Donovan, Rick Astley and others, reads: “Ella and Nathan, a young couple, hopelessly in love, and about to take the biggest step of their lives – marriage. Until it all goes wrong. Will they be together forever, or will he make her cry and say goodbye?”
Billed as “hilarious and heart-warming”, the creative team for the production is led by Debbie Isitt (director and writer of the ‘Nativity!’ franchise) and Jason Gilkison (creative director for ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ and Eurovision 2023).
It’s set to run for approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes including an interval.
Members tickets go on sale Friday, March 17 at 10 am GMT, with general sale taking place four days later. Prices range from £24.50 to £49.50.
Formed in 1983, Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman dominated the latter half of the eighties with a run of more than 100 chart hits, scoring more than 100 UK Top 40 placements and selling 40 million records.
Revisiting an iconic era in British pop history, Stock Aitken Waterman looked back on their phenomenal success in a cover feature for RETROPOP’s March 2023 edition, with Mike admitting: “The overall feeling is it was just too exciting for words. I’d know Donna Summer was coming in on Wednesday morning and on Tuesday evening I’d be thinking, ‘What am I gonna do with her?’.
“The excitement was palpable everywhere, because every time somebody walked out of the door they had a hit. In 1989 specifically, we had about 35 Top 10s and seven No. 1 singles – which are wonderful statistics, but the songs have to be written and there’s a lot of work involved.”
Insisting they treated the job like a 9 to 5, Matt elaborated: “Part of the key was we had a standardised studio day; we’d down tools at 10, go for a pint and then go home and sleep. And we had the weekends off. If we’d have gone tooth and nail and done it six days a week, that would have killed us.”
One of their biggest successes, of course, was with Kylie Minogue, and Pete insisted he had no choice but to sign her to his PWL label because no other record company wanted to work with her.
“When we recorded Kylie Minogue from this television series [‘Neighbours’], Mike was really the only person who knew what Kylie was about because he had a family at that point,” he said.
“We made the record and we went to every record company to take that record – including Simon Cowell, which is why he makes all these comments… Nobody would touch her! Everybody said, ‘You can’t make records with TV stars.’ So in some ways, we didn’t have a choice; we had to go and do it ourselves. It really was that simple.”
At the time, Kylie had already topped the charts in Australia with her debut single, but Pete confessed the industry was blind to her potential.
“That’s the record industry, isn’t it,” he added. “They’ll tell you all these things, but they never see the facts in front of them.”
It was to work on a remix of Kylie’s 2015 single Every Day’s Like Christmas and when it comes to potential future reunions, they maintain nothing’s off the table.
“We never said at the time that we wouldn’t do anything again and I haven’t said I never want to see the two guys again,” hinted Mike. “If something came up that we all thought was a good idea and it had a meaning behind it, then we probably would!”
“Yeah,” said Pete, as Matt affirmed, “I’d go along with that.”
