  We present colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) for a sample of seven young
massive clusters in the galaxies NGC 1313, NGC 1569, NGC 1705, NGC 5236 and NGC
7793. The clusters have ages in the range 5-50 million years and masses of 10^5
-10^6 Msun. Although crowding prevents us from obtaining photometry in the
central regions of the clusters, we are still able to measure up to 30-100
supergiant stars in each of the richest clusters, along with the brighter main
sequence stars. The resulting CMDs and luminosity functions are compared with
photometry of artificially generated clusters, designed to reproduce the
photometric errors and completeness as realistically as possible. In agreement
with previous studies, our CMDs show no clear gap between the H-burning main
sequence and the He-burning supergiant stars, contrary to predictions by common
stellar isochrones. In general, the isochrones also fail to match the observed
number ratios of red-to-blue supergiant stars, although the difficulty of
separating blue supergiants from the main sequence complicates this comparison.
In several cases we observe a large spread (1-2 mag) in the luminosities of the
supergiant stars that cannot be accounted for by observational errors. This
spread can be reproduced by including an age spread of 10-30 million years in
the models. However, age spreads cannot fully account for the observed
morphology of the CMDs and other processes, such as the evolution of
interacting binary stars, may also play a role.
