Fame & Infamy
June 4th, 2007
It's a film, a TV series and a musical. The title song is unforgettable, as anyone who's been clubbing knows - no matter how, er, impaired the crowd is, they can still shout all the words. The experience of seeing it for the first time is just as much a rite of passage as the ones the characters themselves endure. Every American twentysomething has seen it multiple times.
Which is why its latest West End incarnation is so much of a disappointment. The first half ended without me wanting to sing along for more than 10 seconds. I blame whoever wrote the new score.
It was always going to be a double-edged sword. I went for nostalgia. I got some ex-pop star unconvincingly pretending to struggle with his sexuality. The man in question was H from Steps - to be frank he was probably more entertaining in Celebrity Big Brother.
Perhaps more accurately, I wanted a school reunion - to drop in on people I hadn't spoken with in a while and see how they'd changed. Instead, they remained frozen in time, trying vainly to deal with the same problems from two decades ago. As the music droned on, my one thought was that they all needed 12-step programmes.
That's not to say that the dancing wasn't snappy. It was. The acting was a bit stilted, but I suspect most of the cast had long forgotten what it was like to be 16, and American accents faded in and out with each change of scene. The one big update was that PA (New York's elite High School for the Performing Arts) was now populated by posh Aussies rather than talented kids from the Bronx.
But neither they, nor the audience, had any idea how they got there.
