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A trip to the theatre is always a pleasure for me and the Empire staff have developed a quick, slick operation for checking tickets and passes pre-entry in these ongoing Covid-19 times.

We were checked and seated in the beautiful Piano Bar in under 10 minutes and looking at the Christmas Market being set up outside St George’s Hall. What a treat.

I was really excited to see 9-5; I love Dolly Parton, her music, her charity work and the fact that she owns who she is and how she lives. I Love her and thought I’d love the musical too. I didn’t.

I mean, it wasn’t awful. It wasn’t Club Tropicana but something for me just didn’t work. In truth, I knew very little about it before I went, I didn’t know there’d been a film and was expecting a sort of Mamma Mia with Dolly songs. It’s not that.

Maybe it was the over simplification of a really complex and still very real issue. Maybe it was was lack of recognisable Dolly Parton tunes or maybe it was my mood- I do have PMT and, as ‘Franklyn Hart Jnr’ was at pains to point out, women do get touchy at their time of the month.

I enjoyed Dolly’s digital appearances to give us some insights into the characters and an update after the interval and I enjoyed Stephanie Chandos rendition of ‘Backwards Barbie’ but in all truth this wasn’t for me a drop everything and go ticket.

Not funny enough to be a comedy, not serious enough to be a political commentary, 9-5 fell between 2 stools for me and, with the news stories of violence towards women seemingly never ending this just didn’t hit the right note.

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