Viva Forever! at Piccadilly Theatre

13 December, 2012
by: Ricky PS

So turns out we need to re-define Girl Power again...sigh

It was going to be a great night: I was reviewing the Spice Girls musical! Yes, every feminist bone in my body would be rattled. I’d have to watch forgettable hunks save the day, and hyper camp queens wise-crack about women. But then they’d sing “Viva Forever”, that impossibly perfect anthem to pre-teen angst, and the four-star review would write itself.

But this show isn’t annoying, or sublime, it’s just very boring. The first scene sets the trend with long, static pacing and sing-alongs to album tracks you forgot long ago. So instead of being entertained, we’re told a story.

Our heroines are a sub-LittleMix pop group who are hungry for fame and get torn apart by a TV talent show and its cynical star judge, a reliably cruel Sally Dexter. But one of these wannabes is actually talented. She’s Viva, played by Hannah John-Kamen in a charismatic West End debut. Guided by her hippyish adopted Mum, she stays true to herself.

I wished she wouldn’t. The jokes are bad, the plot is grindingly predictable, and it’s simply not worth watching until the very end of the first half, which closes with the evergreen froth of “Mama”.

The second act picks up a little, but confirmed my worst fears. An unthreatening love interest makes everything OK, and the TV show’s evil fashion stylist was on hand to make all us gay best friends in the audience feel acknowledged. As off-beat Mum Lauren, the likeable and soulful Sally Ann Triplett almost gets to make a speech defending women who have body hair. But then she’s ridiculed for not shaving her pubes, and besides, everyone on stage had been lazered, waxed and Veeted until they look like Lolita.

Similarly, we’re supposed to think that the characters’ obsession with fame is shallow, but we’ve only bought a ticket because we see Victoria Beckham in Hello! so often. And as for criticising the X Factor for its exploitative emotionalism—I mean, this is a West End show. Take out the stale sentimentality and all you have left is a silent pile of sequins.

I’m being unfair, of course. These are not the questions you’re supposed to ask of a jukebox musical. Because at no point did anyone involved think that what they were doing actually mattered, and that it might be not only stupid but also wrong to create a show that pretends to love women, when really it attacks them.

Viva Forever runs at Piccadilly Theatre until 1st June 2013

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