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'Eugenius!' is getting a West End transfer this Autumn, playing a limited season at Ambassadors Theatre. This review is from January.
There’s been a rich seam of superhero-based musical theatre lately (think ‘Toxic Avenger’ and ‘Bananaman’) and I guess it makes sense, given both genres share a penchant for high stakes love stories and worryingly tight spandex. New British musical ‘Eugenius!’ doesn’t break much new ground, settling for a relentlessly high energy and kinda lovable riff on comic book cliches.
It’s the handiwork of well-connected musical theatre newbies Ben Adams and Chris Wilkins, who somehow persuaded Warwick Davis (‘Return of the Jedi’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Life’s Too Short’) to stump up the cash for this production: he even played its dastardly villain Lord Hector in a concert performance last year. In the show’s first act, his enthusiams feels a bit baffling. It’s a tired trek through every possible American high school trope – bitchy cheerleaders, mindlessly violent jocks – that’s so unimaginative it makes ‘Glee’ look like a hard-hitting documentary.
Eugene (Liam Forde) is a geek who writes stories about Tough Man, Super Hot Lady and their adventures in space. His mates Janey (Laura Baldwin) and Feris (a rabble-rousingly funny Daniel Buckley) exist to fawn over him and to make dick jokes respectively. In fact, everyone spends a lot of time telling Eugene he’s a genius but the facts don’t really back up the wordplay, given that all he really does is draw some generic comic book stories and then sign away the rights to the first textbook evil movie mogul to show up in his Ohio backwater.
One unlikely transition to Hollywood later, and things are looking a lot brighter. Adams and Wilkins launch into a sort of surreal movie studio drama, with riffs on basically every superhero or sci-fi story you can think of. Director Ian Talbot ramps the pace into overdrive, and a daffy supportive cast embrace the ’80s setting in pink leotards and some totally delightful Fish People costumes. Oh, and the songs are great: ludicrously catchy, and hitting Smash Hits reference points from Whitney Houston to Kim Wilde.
Yes, it’s yet another send-up of a genre that spends an awful lot of time sending itself up. And yes, it’s a bit disappointing that it can’t do more to dissect, rather than just giggle at, the bad old days of superhero sexism: Janey doesn’t have a single interest that doesn’t live in Eugene’s pants, Super Hot Lady’s entire personality is contained in her character’s name and Feris spends a frankly creepy amount of time trying to trick women into having underage sex with him. But strong performances and a stronger soundtrack just about blast those qualms away: holy superlatives, it’s a lot of fun