Blood Brothers

Over two decades into its West End run, Willy Russell's iconic musical Blood Brothers, showing at the Phoenix Theatre, has barely dated at all. This is particularly true of the music, whose 80s drum machines and sweeping, hum-able choruses are very much back in vogue in London's clubland. The story is classic musical fare - best friends slowly torn apart by the pressures of superstition, economics and, above all, class, all underpinned by a haunting secret - told with verve and lyrical freshness that could only have come from this marvellous writer. Its thirty-year tale sees growing prosperity before the disasters of the eighties, but these great social changes take place alongside more intimate emotion: the excitement and danger of an inner-city childhood, the blessed relief of university for a repressed middle class boy, the giggles and goose bumps of teenage love. The kind of work that simply never gets made any more, Blood Brothers deserves its status as a modern classic.