Last night, following days of excitement and anticipation, I headed out with my roommate to see my second West End show of the semester: the Spice Girls musical. This show, called Viva Forever on the posters but "the Spice Girls musical" by everyone else, follows essentially the same premise as Mamma Mia. It takes a soundtrack's worth of songs from the collected works of the band and tries to form them into some sort of follow-able plot. Obviously, no one goes to this show because they are expecting a high-quality, culturally enriching piece of musical theater. They go because it's a musical made out of "Spice Up Your Life." They go because LOOK AT THE PREMISE! Won't this be so much FUN?!
This, my friends, was not fun.
As I said, I was very clear on the fact that I was not going to this show because it was going to be good. I went to this show because it was going to be awesome, in ways completely unrelated to what would undoubtedly be massive amounts of camp and probably weird choices in set dressing and instrumentation. In the first five minutes or so, I thought that what I was seeing was merely a confirmation of what I had expected. "This is, like, so bad but so, so good, right?," I told myself on an endless loop throughout the opening number. As anyone who has ever heard of the Spice Girls can guess, the show's opener was "Wannabe." In this number, all of the under-40 members of the cast, bearing audition numbers on their chests, attempted to out-perform each other for the unseen judges. One by one, they put on disappointed faces and walked offstage until only four spunky-looking young ladies remained. "Ohhh," I and presumably everyone else thought at this point, "so this show is going to be a fictionalized account of the making of the Spice Girls!" As it turns out, they had been auditioning for an X Factor-like show called "Starmaker," whose production staff included one young red-headed girl who, thought everyone in the audience, was clearly going to become Ginger Spice, right?
Wrong.
The girls, in fact, were just some other girl group totally unrelated to but also startlingly similar-looking to the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls, to make it clear right here and right now, are never actually mentioned in this musical at all. Based on the tradition of musicals based on one artist's canon of work, this makes sense. Based on the show's premise, namely, the story of a dancing, pop-music singing, one-petite-blonde-and-one-Mel-B-lookalike-including, British girl group, this dearth of mentions of the Spice Girls themselves makes almost no sense.
As the girls' journey unfolds, the show's first big drama arises: the judges of the show decide to send only one of the group members on to the next round. With each new round of competition for this fledgling star - whose name, inexplicably but unavoidably, is Viva - the producers and judges try, with ever-increasing effort, to create a dramatic backstory for her or to make it seem to the audiences that she is, in some way, a victim of horrific emotional damage. Over and over again, Viva and those who love her are proven to be incorruptible. When the judges suggest to Viva's sexy Spanish vocal coach (of course he exists) that he start a relationship with her to increase ratings, he shuns their suggestions on the grounds of being a good person...but starts a relationship with Viva anyway, off-camera and in an endearing (?) way. When the judges try to surprise the adopted Viva with a dramatic meeting with her never-before-seen biological mother, Viva's loving adopted mom steps in to remind everyone that she does have a family after all. At the same time that all of this is happening, Viva's celebrity judge/coach (think a version of The Voice where Christina Aguilera is replaced by Marie Osmond) is forever flip-flopping between being a terrible person (think Miranda Priestly) and lamenting the sacrifices she has made in exchange for her fame and fortune, and Viva's mom is falling in love with some context-less old dude. [Note: Turns out there are a lot of spoilers in this. Whoops! Luckily, if you care even remotely about having the plot of the Spice Girls musical spoiled for you, you and I are not friends.] The ending is happy, filled with a "Wannabe" reprise, and leaves about 7 different story lines entirely unresolved.
All of this, however, is not what made the Spice Girls musical, without a doubt, the strangest experience of my almost twenty-one years of life. "What was it, then?," you ask. Was it the rendition of "Spice Up Your Life" that had the costumes of "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream," the set of Once on This Island, and the giant pinata-esque human head puppets of a Brazilian Carnaval and/or your worst nightmares? Nope, wasn't that! Was it the actors' awkward reactions to prolonged audience laughter that you've seen high school students handle better? No, sirree, wasn't that either. Surely, then, it was the very existence of a middle-aged love scene to the tune of "2 Become 1," right? No, friends, the weirdest part wasn't even that.
The weirdest part of the Spice Girls musical experience, with no question whatsoever, was the audience interaction. Now, before you jump to rational conclusions, understand that Viva Forever is not concocted as some weird singalong show. It is not a children's musical where the actors occasionally gesture to the audience that it's their turn to sing with them. No, Viva Forever is simply a place where hundreds of incredibly drunk British women in an age range just north of "way too effing old for this," sing and dance in their seats for three hours to the music that clearly had far too large of an impact on their childhoods and their lives. As the curtain rose and the show began, the house was filled with the screaming and clapping one would expect from the midnight premiere of a Twilight movie. This was unexpected, but it is the Spice Girls, so I half-heartedly went along with it for the first few moments. Then the music started, and, from all corners of the theatre, there was singing. Whenever the score came to one of the true "greatest hits," the singing was unceasing and deafening. During "Stop," a safe estimate of the percentage of the audience dancing in unison is probably 80%. As my roommate and I agreed after the show, we would've been mad that the audience so thoroughly drowned out the cast in these moments, were it not for the cast that the cast members were rarely better singers than the audience at large. The post-curtain call actual singalong of the three or four most enormous Spice Girls mega-hits made sense, but from the entire rest of the evening, nothing else did. I am not sad that I spent 20 pounds on my ticket for this show, because it was so strange that telling people about it has quickly become my new favorite pastime. So thanks for the memories, the audience-provided entertainment, and the new hobby, Viva Forever, but I beg you: stop right now. Thank you very much.
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