Daddy Cool
Shaftesbury Theatre, London
Hmmm. It’s sort of difficult to describe last night’s theatrical events. It’s not like we were expecting the new show Daddy Cool to be anything particularly amazing, I mean, after all, it is a musical based on the hits of Boney M, set around London, starring Cindy Beale and half the pop chart rejects in the UK... BUT we weren’t quite expecting... well... that.
I suppose it had a vague storyline - a Romeo and Juliet, wrong-side-of-the-tracks type affair, based around hip-hop, (snigger). But we weren’t so much laughing with the performers as they struggled through reams of dialogue and massacred every Boney M song in the book, as AT THEM. Still, at least we were laughing. There is something pretty funny about watching people on West End stages who can’t act, can’t sing and quite frankly, can’t have been thinking logically when they quit their full time job to pursue a career in performing arts.
Some things that amused me:
1) Play School scenery. I kid you not. Give me a crayon, sit me in a room with a tape of children’s nursery rhymes for inspiration and I probably could have come up with the same sets. At the start we were treated to three full length curtains behind the performers, all featuring what can only be described as “stitchings” of flowers and palm trees. At one point, one curtain failed to fall properly and had to be swept off mid-scene by a desperate, shuffling stage-hand.
2) Where did you go? Haddaway, were he dead, would have not only turned in his grave at this point, he would have backflipped right on out and banged the leads’ heads together as they murdered his precious number. The song was, of course, based around an actual question, ie, Sunny’s gone missing - Sunny, “where did you go?”
3) Giant floating bird. Right at the end, presumably to symbolise the carnival that’s mentioned at the start (when we’re still in the Caribbean with the “stitched” trees), we’re treated to the visual embodiment of the entire production’s budget in one go, in the form of a gigantic Egyptian(?) style face and an enormous chicken. The chicken floats above the stalls for the enjoyment of all the innocents trapped on the balcony. Outstanding.
I could go on, but I’m getting bored now. Basically, it’s an OK show as long as you’re pretty drunk. Do what we did and buy yourself a couple of mini bottles of red wine from Sainsburys. Take a plastic cup and act like you just bought the lot from the bar because you fully support theatres and their continuing efforts to entertain en masse. Oh, and Javine in hotpants, obviously.
