all you need is love! is a musical production with The Beatles Tribute band “Twist & Shout”.

Plot:
A roadie (Frank Kessler) tells us the story of The Beatles’ career from their start in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan (Ian Wood) to their contract with manager Brian Epstein (Ian Wood) and their following success up to their last concert and break-up, all aided by original video footage of The Beatles at the time.

It’s practically impossible to go wrong with a show that just plays the greatest hits of The Beatles and all you need is love! doesn’t: it’s a really entertaining evening.

Things you shouldn’t expect from this Musical: that it somehow takes on the more problematic issues The Beatles faced (the whole drug period is one short joke about how a joint can’t be big enough and that’s it) and that it is anything but light-hearted. That Stuart Sutcliffe is mentioned (they do mention Pete Best, but then he shifts without any comment into Ringo Starr – another thing rather not mentioned: the way Best was fired). That any of them die.

Instead the musical focusses on the fun parts, especially how they worked their way up in Hamburg and the following Beatlemania. And as soon as they really hit the drugs, the narration pretty much ends and it becomes a Beatles Tribute Band concert. Which is completely fine by me.

The band was really good. They really managed to walk the line between “playing exact copies of the songs” and “doing their own thing a little bit” (much like how they looked – close, but not creepy-close).

The only thing that was slightly awkward about the show was the translation back and forth between English and German. The bandmembers are all English natives and the few short sentences they say were usually repeated back to them in German, which made for weirdness. I think that you can trust the Austrian audience enough to understand these short bits in English. But that’s just a really small complaint.

Summarising: Very fun.