Book: Martin Landry
Music & Lyrics: Brandon Lambert
Director: Mark Bell
If your mind was strange enough to think of crossing teen musical Grease with cult horror TV show Squid Games and add a heavy dose of Monty Python you might well come up with something as bizarre as Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp!!.
Having its world premiere in London, this brand-new musical comedy is as curious as its full name may give you reason to believe. It’s set in the US somewhere in the 1950s: a group of young ladies and young men are at the beach getting ready for the Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp!! – a competition to crown the Beach King or Queen. The two groups bump into each other and soon they’re pairing off with their new-found soulmates (all chaste, of course). As young love takes hold, they’re yanked back into why they’re there… to be crowned the king or queen of the beach.
A competition is held that will whittle the contestants down to one final winner. It starts off simple enough – everyone dancing to the latest dance craze, the Ocean Motion (which sounds very reminiscent of You Can’t Stop The Beat from Hairspray) – but then takes a darker turn. The ‘games’ that follow have the losers being killed, so that the victor is not only the winner of all the games but is also the last person to survive.
Bleak as this sounds, the heavy dose of Pythonesque humour the show carries keeps things on the lighter side: this is a musical comedy after all. And as such, it does a wonderful job.
Brandon Lambert’s songs are, in the main, exceptionally witty, if a legal nightmare, musically. For most of them owe more than a passing reference to well-known songs of the 50s and 60s. You get clear musical and lyrical references to Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Wonderful World, Respect, the Shoop Shoop Song, and more. Actually, this constant referencing of older songs is a bit of a distraction as you spend more time trying to work out what the song being parodied is.
Martin Landry’s script is funny, especially if you like juvenile humour and it sends up 1950s high school America wonderfully. The expected characters are out in force. There’s the brooding jock, Dude (Jack Whittle), the virginal cheerleader, Chastity (Janice Landry), the geeks, Mary Joe (Ellie Clayton) and Joe (Tom Babbage) and the comedic characters, Chickie and Dickie (Katie Oxman and Damien James).
The jokes, spoken and physical, come thick and fast though some do outstay their welcome – Chickie and Dickie’s screeching bird calls become annoying very, very quickly, and Chastity and Dude’s circular narrative (about whether she’s stupid and he’s a bum), becomes irritating on the third loop, let alone the seventh or eighth.
These quibbles aside, Fun at the Beach, is a funny and enjoyable piece of absolute nonsense. The story is silly and the characters overblown. It could so easily fall into a dire mess, but confident performances all around and tight direction from Mark Bell keeps everything swimming along nicely. This feels like a shoo-in to become a cult fringe classic and, who knows, could find itself troubling the West End with a little bit of development.
Runs until 22 June 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Hilarious nostalgic nonsense
