The poster campaign for this musical
runs a number of variations on the theme “If you [heart] so-and-so,
you’ll love
Loserville; the
so-and-so’s include
Grease,
Glee and Channel 4 sitcom
The IT Crowd. I can just about see
their point. If, on the other hand, you heart tunes, even the slightest
hint of respect for narrative or chronological attention or an atom of
inventiveness, you may not be quite so ecstatic.
Several of the numbers are drawn from the 2005 début album
Welcome To Loserville by Son Of
Dork, a band formed by James Bourne after the demise of his previous
combo Busted, and sound much as one would expect of such a pedigree:
insistent guitars, adolescent vocals and an almost complete absence of
distinctiveness, as if the Buzzcocks had met S Club 7 in an
industrial-strength food processor. The plot, for want of a better
word, is basic: boy-geek meets girl-geek, they resist pressure by the
“popular” but evil kids and invent the Internet. The computer
breakthrough used as a plot device here in fact occurred at UCLA in
1969 rather than in a high school in 1971 (school computers in 1971?
Really?), but since Francis O’Connor’s visual design is a kind of
Archie-comics version of 1980 or so, a couple of years the other way is
pretty trivial in the scheme of things. But this is the nub of the
matter: it’s an intended period pastiche created by people who seem
neither to know the first thing nor care a fig about getting the period
right, and with a soundtrack that doesn’t even touch down in the same
century.
On its outing in Leeds in the summer,
Loserville
drew mainly indulgent reviews. I suspect the London autumn climate will
be less forgiving. There may be an element of hypocrisy at work: I have
moaned about the prevalence of compilation musicals, yet now a piece of
new(ish) work comes along I moan just as much. But this feels to me
like a show which is not aimed at any theatregoing constituency as
such… hence the posters offering reference points from TV and movies.
The question becomes whether it can mobilise sufficient numbers to take
a punt on sitting in a theatre for a couple of hours. Judging not by
the mandatory press-night ovation but the contrastingly polite applause
given to individual numbers, I doubt it.
Written for the Financial
Times.