This enjoyable if extremely lightweight musical is based around a substantially made-up version of the complicated relationship that existed between tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Written by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Erik Weiner and Hal Goldberg – aka the US team behind previous Fringe favourite The Bomb-itty of Errors – the songs are for the most part melodious but flyaway baubles. But there’s no denying that silly as it all all, the whole thing comes together when our geek heroes break into rhyme: an obnoxious rap-rock number in which the newly hip Microsoft founder declares ‘I’m Bill Gates, bitch’ is unfortunately very funny, and the climactic rap battle between the two protagonists is basically worth the admission in and of itself.
Kane Oliver Parry is very enjoyable as Jobs, here portrayed as a slick, self-absorbed hippie who shamelessly steals from and manipulates others to help him design products that people think are cool rather than ones they actually need. It’s to the credit of Parry that he emerges as the hero of the story without it ever descending into weird fawning – this Jobs is an incorrigible rogue rather than an out-and-out bastard, and his amorality credibly feels like an extension of his free-love philosophy.
Dan Buckley’s Gates comes across less well, a bullied geek who is driven into the heights of megalomania by a cocktail of vast success an resentment that Jobs remains forever cooler than him.
Despite Gates’s more benign latterday image, the show’s somewhat crude read that he became furiously overambitious until he had a change of heart and devoted his life to charity… sort of works in the context of it being a musical, and rightfully brings up the massive antitrust lawsuit he snippily faced down in the late ’90s.
Elsewhere though and its historical inaccuracy feels jarring: aside from the fact that Jobs and Gates did have a genuinely fraught history with each other that is often ignored when it might have been interesting to stage, then each is given a made-up lifelong crush. In Jobs’s case it’s Sally (Elise Zavou), a tech worker turned environmentalist; for Gates it’s Myrtle (Teleri Hughes), an even more hardcore nerd than him who he turns his nose up at as his ego flies into orbit. There are maybe legal reasons why the writers ignored Gates and Jobs’s actual partners, but there’s still something a bit icky about entirely cutting out Melinda Gates and Laurene Powell in favour of virtuous made-up women.
Still, it’s all a bit of fun. Even if Nerds frequently oversimplifies things purely to give its writers an easier life, it does fundamentally skewer both Jobs and Gates with a broad irreverence that carries at least a kernel of truth to it. There surely will be much better satires on our tech overlords written in the future, but this is an easy, breezy musical that mocks its targets enjoyably if undemandingly.
