The Secret Life of Bees, Almeida Theatre review ★★★★★

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage (Sweat) brings Sue Monk Kidd’s 2001 novel The Secret Life of Bees to the stage, but not as a straight-up play. Leaning into a current trend to adapt novels and films into musicals in order to give them a fresh identity (see also Brokeback Mountain, Mrs Doubtfire and Groundhog Day – all opening this month), the show boasts a bluesy, soaring score by Tony-winning composer Duncan Sheik (Spring Awakening), matched with emotive but sometimes simplistic lyrics by Susan Birkenhead. Broadway got it first, but now The Secret Life of Bees musical, under a different creative team, is buzzing at the Almeida.

Set in racially segregated South Carolina in 1964, the story follows 14-year-old white girl Lily (Eleanor Worthington-Cox, looking like butter wouldn’t melt, but with a powerful set of lungs) as she flees her violent father together with her family’s Black maid Rosaleen (a versatile Abiona Omonua), herself escaping the town’s racist gatekeepers. With a postcard of a Black Madonna for guidance, the duo travel to the town of Tiburon, seeking refuge at a honey farm, run by August (Rachel John, quite perfect and the show’s rock) with the help of a community of Black women and an assistant in the form of aspiring lawyer, Zach (Noah Thomas, with oodles of energy and great dance moves).

The cast of The Secret Life of Bees. Photo: Marc Brenner

Director Whitney White’s production unfolds on Soutra Gilmour’s agile, rotating set, with simple structures representing shop-floors and places of worship wheeled on and off. There are plenty of tracks to make you stamp your feet. Supported by an eight-strong country band, who are sadly not on stage, the cast – all strong vocalists who between them have done stints in most of the West End’s long-running favourites – harmonise their way through sentimental ballads and more gutsy, pop-rock numbers. Omonua and Worthington-Cox’s Better Than This is a spirited duet that sets the tone of the show. Our Lady Of Chains, sung by the Boatwright women, is a moving reminder of the importance of religion to this community. What Do You Love? could genuinely be a cutesy pop song, and the hair-raising chorus number Trouble on the House makes a powerful rallying cry.

Nottage’s book isn’t an exact replica of the plot in Kidd’s novel. It’s lighter in places but also brings the era's Black oppression to the fore. Zach’s arrest scene becomes a scenario we sadly recognise from too many news stories, in which white police officers haul an innocent, unarmed Black man out of a car and brutally beat him.

Eleanor Worthington-Cox and Abiona Omonua in The Secret Life of Bees. Photo: Marc Brenner

South Carolina is on the cusp of change. The Civil Rights Act has just been passed and there’s a surfacing of mixed-race couples sparking gossip in the streets. In light of the monumental context of the story, a quibble would be that too much time is spent on Lily’s personal narrative, centred around her desire to know about her dead mother Deborah, who also once lived on the Boatwright honey farm. A scene in which August brings Lily a box of Deborah's belongings is especially jarring when elsewhere, we know an imprisoned Zach could face being lynched for false charges of harassing a white woman. Rosaleen’s sung-through reminder to Lily that ‘it ain’t always about you’, is much needed, but more of fellow runaway Rosaleen’s personal story (whose mother also left) would have been welcome.