Blog: Loserville

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I was off to London's Glittering West End last night... to meet Mr S Hewitt in a PUB. GLAMOUR!

All right, there was more to it than that, as the meeting was a pre-cursor to meeting a whole BUNCH of people and then going to the THEATRE. For LO! we were off to see Loserville - it is (I found out via wikipedia, just before heading off) written by A Bloke From Busted, and INDEED I had seen him on the way to the pub, LOITERING outside the theatre, looking very happy, talking to fans. And happy he should look - this is the first ORIGINAL (i.e. not an adaptation of something else or a revival) BRITISH musical to appear on the West End for... well, for AGES.

So it must totally count as homework for my course, right?

We'd got cheapo tickets WAY up high in the sky, and when I got to mine I found I could only really see half of the stage - luckily though no-one turned up for the seat below me on the front row, so I was able to sneak down and LEAN on the rails, having a pretty much perfect view of everything.

And the view was GOOD - all right, the story was pretty nondescript (and had several bits that didn't really make sense) and the whole thing had a bit of an air of "Oh right, these are the things you HAVE to have in a musical" (including American Accents) but STILL: it was GRATE to see a musical where you didn't already know ALL of the songs, and it was a HECKLOAD of fun. Some of the tunes got a bit samey (which is probably due to the Musical Direction, i guess) but there were some BIG TUNES, especially the theme song which was ACE. The supposed geekiness of it all was a bit Mainstream Geek Archetype i.e. Star Trek, Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars and NOTHING MORE, but the whole running GAG about one of the characters getting ideas to WRITE Star Wars in the future was pretty good.

Best of all though, was The Staging. It was AMAZING - INDEED my limited experience of West End Shows tells me that that's usually ALWAYS the best thing. It had a very limited set that FLEW around on WHEELS, with BITS reconfiguring to make different spaces at high speed. There was a MOTIF throughout that all the scenery and all the props were DRAWINGS on pieces of notepaper. It worked really really well, especially when a scene would be made by the chorus holding up large pieces of paper, then instantly FLIPPING them as characters moved somewhere else. It was really good.

So yeah - odd that the SHOW clung so closely to What A Musical Should Be (thought doing it very well), while the DESIGN was all up for new ideas, but it all worked. I hope it CONTINUES to do well - it would be awfully nice if The West End got the idea that original British musicals could be a SUCCESS!

posted 17/10/2012 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

"but the whole running GAG about one of the characters getting ideas to WRITE Star Wars in the future was pretty good." If slighty borrowed by the 1999 short film Lucas In Love... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkxdcCswfq0
posted 24/10/2012 by PhoeniX PhiL

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