So, I finally got to see Willy Russell’s musical play Blood Brothers. And I get why it’s so popular, and very much enjoyed it, even if I disagree with a lot of Russell’s beliefs, at least as they come across on stage. Yeah, like he or anyone else is going to be bothered, 26 years into this phenomenon’s international touring history.

In essence, Blood Brothers is old-school Marxist thinking as rendered in three dimensions plus orchestrated sound by Jim Steinman. Steinman, you’ll remember, is the record producer responsible for Meat Loaf, whose approach could be summarised as ‘never knowingly understated’. I read an interview with him once in which he described his job being to produce music “for people who wear chrome pyjamas in leather beds”, and that sums up his melodramatic approach to musical narrative perfectly. Subtle, he ain’t.

The story is semi-Shakespearean, in kitchen sink drag. A put-upon mother of many children becomes pregnant once again, and ends up swapping one of her new twins in exchange for a week’s paid holiday from the posh woman whose house she cleans. No, it doesn’t make much sense if you think about it, even with some swearing on the Bible involved, but please swallow this conceit or what follows really won’t sit with you.

What follows is tried and tested stuff in which the twin brothers grow up in separate homes of very different sorts, but become bosom buddies none the less. Actually, the title of the piece gives away the nature of their relationship with more precision. One brother is socialised with proletarian values, the other becomes a member of the bourgeoisie. It’s put with slightly more subtlety than that, but only slightly.

It’s when the brothers are young – though played by adults – that the play was at its strongest for me. The performers (I was too much of a cheapskate to buy a programme to find out who, save that one of them, the mother of the twins, was a Nolan Sister) did an excellent job at bringing their characters to life as kids. Looked like some time had been spent to good effect getting them to inhabit what kids look and sound like – stuff that wouldn’t have been in the didactic script I’m sure, but was brought out in the rehearsal process. Anyway, it paid off: these sequences were lively and convincing.

Unfortunately, somewhat florid narration got in the way of emotional connection with the audience. Sequences that could have been conveyed by the good actors were rendered redundant by what amounted to voiceover. Perhaps this is because the show has its origins in what amounts to a theatre in education piece, and Russell wanted to make the script immune to the vagaries of directors and performers. Anyway, what it means is that the flow is interrupted from time to time.

This being a piece with a message, it’s no surprise that brother Mickey, the working class one, got a raw deal. Heading for minimum wage work while his middle class sibling swans off to university, it’s not long before Mickey gets caught up in crime, locked up, and hooked on medication to deal with depression. Or maybe that should be anomie, the correct Marxist term for what happens when workers are alienated from the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Yes, it’s heavy handed. But there’s also a kind of truth in that dogmatism, and when put to relatively stirring tunes with super-retro syndrums booming and thwacking away and a sax tootling over the top, it makes for grand entertainment. And that relieved me of notions of my place in the global economic order for a while and allowed me to enjoy myself, which is what musical theatre should be all about.

(Please note that Jim Steinman was not the actual musical director of the show on this or any other occasion: that was a metaphor of some sort.)