Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

AMATEUR singers aged between 73 and 89, confronting mortality with a theatrical show of modern songs from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Morrissey and The Buzzcocks?

Let’s be honest, it sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? But Young @ Heart and No Theater’s End Of The Road is a wonderfully wise and poignant, yet joyful and ultimately life-affirming, piece of theatre – not a concert.

Hardly anyone will have left this show without a smile on their face and How often are you going to have a dignified eighty-something woman urging you to ‘get up and dance to that funky music’ before she and her cohorts launching into a Sly And The Family Stone tune?

Yet It would have needed a heart of stone to have not had a tear in your eye at several points during End Of The Road, not least when one of the Massachusetts-based chorus sang Springsteen’s You’re Missing and clearly meant his late wife, or when their voices cracked and soared during Morrissey’s Sing Your Life.

Who knew that, transposed to this context, even the likes of The Pixies’ Monkey’s Gone To Heaven and The Travelling Wilburys’ Handle With Care would take on a wholly different resonance, let alone that The Buzzcocks’ What Do I Get? would become a raunchy statement of defiance and self-determination?

Marvellous, moving, surprising and funny – what more could you want?
See it if you get the chance and have your heart and your eyes opened.