Last Updated on February 7, 2026
The Ultimate Disco Celebration – Get Down Tonight comes to town.
Many years ago, I was rehearsing with a band in a rehearsal room in New York. From the next-door studio came the sound of a series of some of the biggest disco hits known to man. Within a few minutes, we were happily chatting with the members of the legendary KC and the Sunshine Band. If you’re not old enough to remember them, KC and The Sunshine Band were huge in the 1970s, selling over 100 million records worldwide. You’ll have certainly danced to some of their feel-good songs, including ‘Give It Up’, ‘That’s The Way (I Like It)’, and ‘Get Down Tonight’. The band won a Grammy award for Album of the Year in 1979 as part of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, had five number one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and four UK top 10 singles.
So it was with a John Travolta-esque spring in my step that I headed down to the Charing Cross Theatre for the London premiere of GET DOWN TONIGHT, the story of KC and the Sunshine Band. The show started off with a highly successful run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024 under the name Who Do Ya Love? and has a book by J. F. Lawton (Pretty Woman: The Musical) and over 20 of Harry Wayne Casey’s (KC) songs.
The show is set in 1970s Miami, chronicling musician KC’s history as he developed his signature Floridian ‘Sunshine Sound’ that went on to dominate the charts. It tells the story of four friends: Harry Wayne Casey (KC), Dee, Gina and Orly. Harry is naïve and inexperienced both in terms of understanding the music business and on a personal level. Dee is feisty and pushy. She is fully engaged with the social and sexual experimentation of the era. Gina is looking for love, but in the short term, anything would do. And Orly is a Cuban-American, just returned from a tour of duty fighting in Vietnam, looking to pick up the pieces of his life.
The staging is simple, with seven glitter balls and club lighting creating a disco-tastic ambience. There’s a balcony with two flights of stairs leading up to where the live band are positioned. The predominantly empty stage is dressed with simple props, taking us from a club to the record store where the young Harry/KC works, to Dee’s hippyish bedroom with its bean bag and the recording studio where KC lays down his first tracks.
There is a ‘meta’ element in the construction of the book, as the opening acts of the show contain a lot of discussion between Harry and Dee about how the show should be constructed. This is initially amusing, and there are a lot of clever musical theatre in-jokes and references that were enjoyed by the audience. For me, the joke started to wear thin, and I would have liked more character development, allowing the audience to invest more in the cast and their individual journeys. But there is a lot of humour in J. F. Lawton’s script (“Beatles and Stones on the right for the deviants”).
Ross Harmon gives a gawkily charming performance as the young KC, on a path that leads him to explore both his sexuality and the music business. Harmon has an expressive voice that is particularly impressive in the ballads, and, along with all the cast members, is an energetic dancer.
The character of Dee is the confident foil to KC’s diffidence, pushing him on. Paige Fenlon has a nasal vocal tone that gives her soulful delivery power and impact. But she is bearing a secret that is only revealed at the show’s end.
Annabelle Terry is lovable as Gina, devastated when her relationship with Harry doesn’t work out, but able to move on. Terry has a classic musical theatre voice and brings those chops to her big solo features.
Orly is a more nuanced role ,and Adam Taylor does a great job bringing out the different levels. Scarred by his experiences of war, he throws himself into the burgeoning gay scene of the time with predictable results. Taylor has a wiry frame and sings and dances with precision, looking the part of a young, gay Hispanic, the initial underground audience for disco.
Director and Choreographer Lisa Stevens keeps up an energetic pace, and if the choreography isn’t period authentic, it really doesn’t matter as the dancing is high-energy, vibrant and helped by some suitably outrageous costuming. The band, arranger Mark Crossland and sound designer Chris Whybrow do an excellent job of recreating the disco sound world, and sound levels are at a civilised level which won’t scare off older audience members like me.
In a poignant moment, the real-life KC introduced the show, adding flesh to the fiction. He is an important historical figure, having written and produced Rock Your Baby, the seminal George McCrae song regarded as the first proper disco track. This show stands as his testament, as well as being a campy, fun night out.
19 September – 15 November
Charing Cross Theatre
The Arches,
Villiers Street
London
WC2N 6NL
Box Office: 08444 930 650
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So is this a way of Harry Wayne Casey coming out as gay?