Thank you very much. The Telegraph’s Tim Walker needs somebody with a human touch.
In a theatre review brought across in the telegraph which accompanied my parents from Blighty, there’s a review of the new Spice Girls musical. And it’s not ever so complimentary:
When one is up against the tsunami of hype that the publicists of Viva Forever! have managed to whip up, it is awfully tempting to try to be a really hip old daddy-o, go with the flow, and, after lighting a Hamlet cigar and taking out the earplugs, dispensing the five stars that the exclamation mark appear to require.
One cannot, however, ignore the old tosh-o-meter, when the needle goes off the scale to register a show that’s so bad, it ought, if there were any justice, to be accorded a minus-star rating.
This show is not just bad, it is definitively, monumentally and historically bad.
I shall not dwell on the plot, because, goodness knows, Jennifer Saunders, its writer, certainly hasn’t done. There is no acting to speak of, either, so I shall not identify any of the girls who appear in it, lest they be subjected to recriminations.
Viva Forever! marks the West End coming to an unequivocal dead end.
I don’t think he likes it. He gave it zero stars. Which is a whole one less than his colleague Charles Spencer gave it after enjoying enduring the opening night:
I’ll tell you what I wanted, what I really, really wanted – I wanted this terrible show to stop.
The producer Judy Craymer hit pay dirt with Mamma Mia!, which became a global smash hit. But that show was blessed with a witty and touching script by Catherine Johnson and a raft of perfect pop songs from Abba.
So cashing in on the Spice Girls’ back catalogue must have seemed a no-brainer. In fact, it was a ghastly mistake.
This musical is tawdry, lazy and unedifying, and one could sense a miasma of disappointment emanating from an audience of up-for-it Spice Girls fans slowly realising that they had paid top whack to see a clunker.
This is a fatuous show with nothing fresh to say about popular culture and our fixation with fame.
If you love the Spice Girls stay at home and listen to their greatest hits.
I’m unlikely to be hitting the West End to see this or any other musical any time soon, but some of you, my loyal subjects, might be considering a trip to the Piccadilly Theatre before June 1st 2013.
I’m here to tell you that Tim and Charles think that’s a really, really bad idea.