Turbine Theatre, London – until 28 May 2023
Get your leg warmers out and prepare for blast off, Ben Adams and Chris Wilkins’ adorable pop musical Eugenius! is back. This ridiculous, feel good sweetheart of a show marries together comic strip capers, sci-fi, 1980s nostalgia, earworm songs, obvious but irresistible comedy, and high camp in a caffeinated confection that is about as subtle as being beaten about the head with a rolled up copy of Smash Hits, but a lot more fun. Even when presented in a less-than-ideal space.
The premise is simple: High School geek Eugene (a deeply loveable Elliott Evans, who fields a terrific high rock tenor voice) escapes his dislocated existence by drawing sci-fi cartoons inspired by dreams he’s been having. They get picked up as the basis for a Hollywood blockbuster, Eugene’s life is transformed… then fact and fiction start to collide to broad comic effect. If Hannah Chissick’s staging is less successful overall than Ian Talbot’s original Other Palace production, for reasons I’ll get to shortly, the storytelling certainly feels clearer.
Aside from the wackiness, there’s also a lot of heart here. Eugene’s Mum is dead and his uneasy relationship with his well-meaning but over-stretched Dad is conveyed with surprising sensitivity. So too is the bond between Eugene and his best friends, the endlessly priapic Feris and adoring fellow-geek Janey. Anybody who saw the original production will probably miss the sheer brilliance of Dan Buckley and Laura Baldwin, but James Hameed and Jaina Brock-Patel inherit these roles with considerable charm, attack and strong vocals.
The unreconstructed attitude to women firmly roots the show in the past (Maddison Firth is great glamorous fun as a cartoon then film character named simply ‘Super Hot Lady’ and the air-headed actress who portrays her, but the lack of agency and intelligence in the characterisation as written may not sit well with many viewers) but it’s worth noting that it’s Brock-Patel’s quietly strong Janey who is the heartbeat and resolution of a story that, on paper, looks pretty male-centric. In fairness, Super Hot Lady’s male counterparts, the hunky Tough Man and the Schwarzenegger-lite actor who plays him, are also thick as mince. Dominic Andersen is hilarious as these terminally confused himbos.
Additionally, this new version redresses the male-female power balance even further by making the villainous film mogul who corrupts Eugene’s artistic vision and drives a wedge between him and his friends, into a woman. Lara Denning delivers a bona fide star performance, all high hair, high belting and high camp, she’s worth the price of admission all by herself. Rhys Wilkinson is magnificently vivid as her comically spiteful sidekick/underling, and is gloriously double cast as a clarion-voiced Space Diva. Joseph Beach offers great comedy value as a vengeful space villain, chewing the scenery like a tall version of Shrek’s Lord Farqaad.
Chissick’s well paced but underpopulated production (it badly needs at least four more cast members) leans heavily into the cartoon aesthetic: Andrew Exeter’s unit set is repeatedly augmented by colourful, impressive video designs (co-created with Andy Walton; the show’s authors Adams and Wilkins even pop up at one point, to delightful and unexpected effect). Inventive and eye-catching as this all is, the whole show feels frustratedly hemmed-in on the Turbine’s tiny stage.
This applies especially to Aaron Renfree’s inspiredly derivative choreography, which recreates signature moves from sundry music videos of the 1980s. It needs room to breathe but that seldom happens. The playing space is so small that the company gets few chances to really cut loose without possibly banging into the scenery, inevitably robbing Eugenius! of some of its euphoria. So does the tinny sound design, only a couple of the numbers really taking wing, largely due to the epic voices. Musically, the show pastiches the sounds of the 80s with considerable wit and flair, and produces a bunch of exhilarating, genuinely memorable tunes, but the music of that period was all about excess and bombast, and it’s hard to recreate that with just two musicians. Still, anybody who hears the title song will be humming it for days afterwards.
Despite the aforementioned reservations, the pure joy and affection of Adams and Wilkins’s off-the-wall creation remains. Eugenius! is still a good night, but the confounding thing is, as any fan will tell you, is that it has the potential to be a really great one.
