Fangirls review – sugar rush musical turns a teen crush criminal
Remember how, long before the intensity of first love, there was the juggernaut force of the first crush? This musical comedy from Australia takes that chest-squeezing feeling and magnifies it to the power of 100 in this glittery, garish, girl-fantasy pop concert of a show.
Edna (Jasmine Elcock) is a gawky 14-year-old from Sydney with a crush the size of her continent on pop star Harry. Played by Thomas Grant as a blend of Harry Styles and early-era Robbie Williams, with a twist of Justin Timberlake, he is the lead singer of the boyband Heartbreak Nation. The group’s forthcoming concert in town sets off a plot that goes from securing a ticket to a quest to liberate Harry from what Edna perceives as the unhappy prison of his fame.
There is Mean Girls-style schoolyard politics between Edna and her sometime friend Brianna (Miracle Chance) and frenemy Jules (Mary Malone). That is blended with Dear Evan Hansen-style soul-searching and adolescent angst – here around girlhood – carried in songs such as Learning to Be Lonely and Disgusting. Added to that is a plot that turns ever more baroque and operatic.
All together, it is a lot. Directed by Paige Rattray, the production has an amped up concert sound and feel. The lighting brings melodrama with mini black-outs and floodlights and a back-screen blasting psychedelic patterns, planetary matter and what looks like the insides of a lava lamp. It seems designed to take us inside a teenager’s lurid fantasy world and then, after the interval, the concert itself, but instead looks slightly too obvious and tacky.
The best of the songs by Yve Blake (who also wrote the book) capture the fever and sugar-rush of teen infatuation – as in Nobody and Actually Dead – and there are funny refrains from the ensemble around sweaty palmed awkwardness all the way through.
Elcock, who recently graduated from drama school, gives a fabulous performance, and the cast’s voices meet the sometimes difficult range of the songs. Gracie McGonigal, who plays schoolgirl Lily, excels with superbly arch harmonising.
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The score includes electro pop, rap, emo and a cappella. Sometimes the music and lyrics jar in tone, but, more troublingly, the comedy clashes against the book’s darkness, which speaks of teen depression, self-harm, friendship fallouts, domestic violence and climate disaster. These are dealt with too briefly, although the mother-daughter friction is more meaty and moving (Debbie Kurup is great as Edna’s overworked single mum).
Shame and shaming lies at the heart of this musical, as well as the notion that crushes such as Edna’s are a valid rite-of-passage, not to be undermined or dismissed as melodramatic as they so often are. Yet the book engineers a plot that is itself melodramatic and takes a girl crush to a criminal extreme.
Brianna and Jules are too arch and clownish to reveal anything of their inner worlds while Edna’s soul-searching gives way to plot, which is fun and glittery, but the musical goes from what might have been a penetrating exploration of young femininity to an absurdist comedy caper which never quite captures the quietly tortured ache of that first crush.
At Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 24 August
