Review from The Times.

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Calamity Jane
By Michael Billington for The Guardian

The hillbilly heroine dresses like a man. Her prowess with a gun deters potential suitors. Only when she embraces her femininity does she find true love. Such is the outline of Calamity June, which started life as a 1953 Doris Day movie; and, although the stage version has its moments, it suffers from some fairly risible plotting. Much of the first half hinges on a mistaken-identity joke by which a Chicago chanteuse's maid passes herself off as her mistress to the Deadwood citizens; but, such is the power of showbusiness, that the maid, Kate, quickly blossoms into a saloon star.

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Calamity Jane
By Paul Taylor for The Independent

Hornswaggle me, but you'd have to be a durn cussed coyote, if your heart didn't warm just a little to Calamity Jane. Well, to the original movie version at any rate. This stage adaptation of it is considerably more hit-and-miss. Clambering into Doris Day's dishevelled buckskins is Toyah Willcox. Fresh from her adventures in the jungle with "Wild" Wayne Sleep on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, she's now in Deadwood, having adventures with Wild Bill Hickok in a show that, on a couple of occasions, made me muse about a possible subtitle "I'm a Mere Critic, Get Me Out of Here".

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Calamity Jane
By Peter Hepple for The Stage


This cheerful musical reminds us of a time not only before Sondheim but Rodgers and Hammerstein. Yet it proves that this era, in which the action was interrupted by song and dance numbers that had slight relevance to the plot, had something to commend it, if only because you knew what you were going to get eventually.

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