Stand up!
Lyric Theatre, London Until April 3, 2hrs 30mins
Rating: 
Don’t worry, as Bob Marley would say, you’ll feel a whole lot better coming out of this show than you did going in. It’s a wholly convincing resurrection of the reggae superstar, who died from cancer in 1981 aged just 36.
Arinzé Kene gives a socking performance, delivered against a backdrop of poverty, gun violence and a great wall of loudspeakers. Even though the story is a bit too complicated and shaky, it sounds great and feels edgy.
You get all the jukebox songs, such as Could You Be Loved?, Stir It Up!, I Shot The Sheriff!, Redemption Song, Jamming. And, finally, Get Up. Stand Up (which the audience did more happily than anything).
Arinzé Kene (above) gives a socking performance, delivered against a backdrop of poverty, gun violence and a great wall of loudspeakers
Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall touches, fascinatingly, on Bob’s abandonment by his parents (Nate Simpson plays Bob as a young boy), his stardom, his ambivalent flirtation with Jamaican politics, his attempted assassination and the CIA’s idiotic fear of him as a potent black messiah.
Chris Blackwell (Henry Faber), who founded Island Records, is a pivotal part of the Bob Marley legend, along with Peter Tosh (Natey Jones) and Bunny Wailer (Jacade Simpson), Bob’s soul mates in the band.
There’s a lovely vignette of the lads touring the UK in 1974, miserably failing to hitch a ride in a Leicestershire snowstorm.
If Kene’s plaintive voice holds the show together, Shelley Maxwell’s choreography provides a cool, sinuous groove for the dance ensemble. But the evening would be diminished without Gabrielle Brooks as Bob’s long-suffering wife Rita, whose rendition of No Woman, No Cry brims with anger at his serial adultery.
Likewise, Shanay Holmes as Bob’s beauty queen lover makes Waiting In Vain a piercing ballad of hurt.
Clint Dyer, the event’s director, creates an atmosphere that feels like a live gig with a ganja-like smell wafting through the stalls. Bob’s soulful, glorious, pulsating reggae is here in abundance and it’s a joy to be wrapped in it.