ajhlovestheatre

FUN AT THE BEACH ROMP-BOMP-A-LOMP!!

Music and lyrics by Brandon Lambert

Book by Martin Landry

Developed with Mark Bell

Directed by Mark Bell

Southwark Playhouse Borough – The Large, London – until 22 June 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/fun-at-the-beach-romp-bomp-a-lomp/

I’ve seen some fairly bizarre musicals over the years, from the rock opera about dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki (Out of the Blue at the Shaftesbury in the ‘90s), to a Norwegian saga about witch-hunts in medieval Germany (Which Witch at the Piccadilly, same decade), and more recently here at Southwark, who could forget Yeast Nation, a jolly romp set in the primordial slime and where all the characters were single cell organisms. Brandon Lambert and Martin Landry’s rather random confection is right up there with the weirdest though.

If you can imagine Hunger Games filtered through the sunny, mindless Americana that infused mass populist mid twentieth century movies and rock music then you’ll have some idea of what to except at this deeply strange new musical comedy. Fun At The Beach Romp-Bomb-A-Lomp!! marries the apocalypse with farcical comedy and a bouncy pastiche score. It’s not a long show, running at barely ninety minutes, but it still feels stretched to breaking point, despite the efforts of a talented, hard-working cast.

The basic premise is pretty straightforward: like a cartoon burst into life, the show centres on a sextet of fun lovin’, love seekin’ all-American youngsters who express themselves entirely in the gosh darnit clichés familiar to anybody who grew up with things like Happy Days and The Monkees on the telly, all locked in a battle to become King or Queen of the Beach. For all the candy-coloured brightness of Emily Bestow’s design, the competition has a sinister edge, with a Big Brother-like announcer (voiced by Landry) becoming increasingly threatening as the show goes on, and the fact that failure in each set task results in the death of the losing contestant.

What should have been bubblegum laced with cyanide feels like a comedy sketch that has been allowed to ramble on for far too long. Mark Bell’s production starts off as cute and vital but fatally loses pace as it progresses. It barely makes sense and the lack of real humour and relatable characters means that it starts to feel like a bit of a slog. The comic trope of repeating the same gag ad infinitum only really works if there was a germ of wit there in the first place and far too often this show feels as though it’s beating a proverbial dead horse. It’s neither macabre nor hilarious enough, and, aside from Francesca Jaynes’s perky choreography, the staging suffers from an unhelpful imprecision, the transitions from humorous light to apocalyptic darkness done with little finesse.

The cast are selling the material for rather more than it’s worth but there are too many sequences that are only mildly amusing where they should be sidesplitting, and the sense of threat rubbing shoulders with upbeat peppiness is fudged and never as unsettling as it should be. Janice Landry as perpetually spaced-out Chastity and Jack Whittle as the square-jawed supercool Dude (that’s actually the character’s name!) are particularly impressive, never letting their very specific characterisations drop even when the show takes ever more outlandish turns. Katie Oxman and Damien James do nice work as a couple whose primary mutual attraction seems based on an enthusiasm for raucous bird impressions (that gets old pretty quickly), and Ellie Clayton displays genuine comic and vocal chops as a boy-mad innocent who meets a sticky end before returning as a malevolent ‘Beach Ghost’ (the plot really doesn’t bear close scrutiny).

The songs are so closely and lovingly modelled on existing vintage tunes (‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ becomes ‘Mature Women Don’t Whine’, ‘R.E.S.P.E.C.T’ is transformed into ‘A.P.P.R.E.C.I.A.T.I.O.N’, ‘It’s In His Kiss’ vs ‘It’s In His Peck’) as to surely only be a few notes away from copywright infringement. They’re decent pastiches but their flimsy, derivative nature is shown up in the finale when we get an authentic pop banger (‘Rockin’ Robin’) which lifts the spirits without snark. The assertion, near the shows conclusion that “even the stupidest musical” can be turned around with one great song, suggests a certain lack of faith in the art form. The voices and Lambert’s ‘Beach Band’ are very good.

Ultimately this is a curious, frustrating evening. It’s not that Fun At The Beach Romp-Bomb-A-Lomp!! isn’t fun, at least intermittently, but it may leave you pondering what you have just watched, and why.