LOSERVILLE
Garrick Theatre, London WC2
Opened 17 October, 2012
**

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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