Gary Barlow is confident about success of Take That musical The Band: "I know what I'm doing"
The Take That frontman said he wasn't worried about the failure of similar musicals like Viva Forever!
Gary Barlow has said that he knows The Band will be successful because he knows what he's doing.
The judge and mastermind behind BBC1's Let It Shine said that the touring musical would be a hit and not suffer a similar fate to the likes of Spice Girl jukebox production Viva Forever!
Speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press immediately after the final of Let It Shine, Barlow said: "This show will be great... I know what I'm doing."
He also revealed details about upcoming touring musical The Band, which is written by Tim Firth and produced by David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers. The trio are behind Barlow's latest West End production The Girls, which opened to positive reviews.
"I know the team who's in charge of these guys," said Barlow. "We've just had a show open on the West End this week, we've had rave reviews. I know the team that's going to be working with them all, they're going to have skills and careers that's going to hopefully last them for the rest of their lives."
More like this
He also revealed further details about musical The Band, which will open in Manchester on September 8 and tour the UK for almost a year before coming to an unspecified West End theatre in 2018.
He said that winning band Five to Five will be doing "no spoken acting" in the production, and that instead the plot of the musical centres around five 16-year-old girls. The music of Take That provides the soundtrack to their lives.
"The interesting thing with what these guys are going to do is, there's no spoken acting for them at all," revealed Barlow. "It's all done through song.
"When I started this process, when you think of the risk we've actually taken... I hoped for a really good band at the end of this, we've got a brilliant band."
For Let It Shine's losing bands Drive and Nightfall, there still could be a role for them in the musical. Barlow said that there will be three understudies for the musical and he was hoping that they would come from the two losing acts on the show. He also said that the likelihood of Five to Five making an album was "definitely say that’s on the cards."
Ahead of the show opening in the West End, Barlow said that "the one thing" he had learned from making musicals was that touring them first is key to ensure their quality and therefore popularity.
"You tour them around the country, keep tweaking and tweaking, making it better, making it tighter, making the sound better. It's all about this now being the best show on in the theatre."
Barlow said that all of the performers bar one character had already been cast for The Band, and that the five female leads are all unknown actresses.
He remained tight-lipped on further details of the plot, saying simply: "All will be revealed."
Find out more about how to get tickets for The Band and where the musical will be touring here.
