One of the buzziest and frankly most bewildering hits of this year’s fringe is Club NVRLND, a work of (I guess) immersive club theatre that attracted a very large, very enthusiastic crowd on the Tuesday night I saw it.
Setting aside the fact it’s a hit, and donning my ‘critic bastard’ hat, the nicest thing I can say about Club NVRLAND is that the creative team have done a wonderful job of coming up with an idea for a show that people – including a lot of young people – are clearly hugely into.
But Club NVRLND could have been done better. It feels like a distant cousin to the recent West End musical smash & Juliet, but made by people with no experience or aptitude for musical theatre.
As you might guess, the show – conceived of and directed by Steven Kunis – is a riff on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, set a nebulous number of years after the events of the original story. Peter is on the cusp of 30, and Wendy is now on the verge of getting married. We first meet her as she stumbles tearily in her dress to the door of Club NVRLND, which is – of course – good old Neverland reimagined as a nightclub. There are a few oddities with this: Smee is now a hot jacked guy, the crocodile is a big Romanian gangster. But I think we can basically get on board with the premise.
But the book, by rising star Jack Holden, is at best negligible, a flimsy account of the various characters working through their unresolved romantic pains and ongoing refusal to grow up. It just about does the trick but it doesn’t exactly feel laboured over and there are huge swathes of the show where no plot is obviously happening. While this is in large part due to the fact the cast spend a lot of time singing millennial pop bangers (think ‘Sexyback’, think ‘Toxic’, think ‘Fix You’), it doesn’t have the storytelling thrust and dynamism of the typical musical. The mic’d up performers roam the crowd but often this simply means you can’t see them. The choreography is pretty basic. And the singing is in several cases actively bad - my general understanding is most trained actors can sing pretty well, so it’s definitely an eccentric decision to cast several that audibly can’t.
It’s possible to acknowledge Club NVRLND is an extremely fun concept that hasn’t been executed brilliantly, but is nonetheless a genre of one and thus attracting Fringe audiences hungry for a bit of millennial pop-fuelled club theatre. I think the show does have promise, but if it’s to have a life outside the Fringe bubble it’s going to need to grow up – a lot.
