Theatre review: Here & Now

The latest group to get the jukebox musical treatment is one that feels inevitable, given the general sense of camp ridiculousness that Pete Waterman's surprisingly enduring manufactured pop quartet plus Lee have always had: Steps are a good match for a genre that's at its best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and Shaun Kitchener's (book) Here & Now gets the tone (mostly) right from the start: Will it, like Viva Forever!, try to emulate Mamma Mia! with a Mediterranean island setting? Nah, we're going down the Pound Shop. Better Best Bargains, a totally unrealistic discount store that has more than two members of staff on duty at any given time, is where Caz (Lara Denning) has worked for 25 years without a promotion or pay raise, but she's still pretty chipper about the place because she's friends with her co-workers, and they all introduce the week's new special offers by dressing up as condiments and singing "Five, Six, Seven, Eight."

When her husband dumps her just before her 50th birthday, Caz declares that this is going to be the "Summer of Love," encouraging her co-workers to go after their crushes: Neeta (Rosie Singha) likes shelf-stacker Ben (Ben Darcy,) while Robbie (understudy Dean Rickards) falls for his favourite drag queen Jem (River Medway) when she comes into the shop for a hairspray emergency.

I can't imagine it's meant as too much of a plot twist that Vel (Jacqui Dubois) fancies delivery driver Tracey (Lauren Woolf,) while Caz herself seems to be having a flirtation with random posho Max (Edward Baker-Duly,) but he turns out to be the villain of the piece, who wants to close down the shop and build seafront condos in its place (Phill felt there was a joke to be made about River Medway ending up in the sea, but honestly if I wasn't going to do that when she was playing a character who was literally under da sea I think the moment has passed.)

Anyway Here & Now doesn't really make the jukebox musical mistake of trying to come up with a plot that makes any kind of sense, instead crowbarring twists around the best-known Steps songs - the fact that the shop is going to close is, of course, a "Tragedy," while the most hilariously camp moment might be Neeta and Ben getting their big romantic moment to "Something In Your Eyes" while taking the bins out. The atmosphere does wobble a bit when Caz' backstory turns out to be having lost a baby, which is a bit of tonal whiplash in among all the camp, but then again Kitchener has written for Hollyoaks, which might explain the wildly inappropriate mood swings. And possibly why Darcy looks a bit like a lost Pickard brother.

Finty Williams gets to do her best Sybil Fawlty impression as egotistical store manager Patricia, and the songs get spread out across a large cast, rather than allocating each member of Steps a character. Which is just as well as one of them would just have to stand at the side silently smiling, and another would have to move to Dubai. Tonight's performance was plagued by a technical issue at the interval which meant it dragged out to three hours, so the rather extensive '90s-style megamix at the end definitely felt like overkill, but otherwise Rachel Kavanaugh's production delivered just the right levels of daft fun.

Here & Now by Shaun Kitchener, Andrew Frampton, Pete Waterman, Mark Topham, Karl Twigg, Rita Campbell, Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers, Lance Ellington, Sara Dallin, Keren Woodward, Mike Stock, Carl Ryden, Fiona Bevan, Scott Gausden, Your Mum, Barry Upton, Steve Crosby, Jackie James, Greg Kurstin, Sia Furler, Barry Gibb, Robin Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Dr. Teeth, Animal, Floyd Pepper, Janice, Zoot, Lips, Thomas G:Son, Henrik Sethsson, Erik Bernholm, Matt Aitken, Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Jörgen Elofsson, Andreas Carlsson and Ali Thomson is booking until the 9th of November at the New Wimbledon Theatre; then continuing on tour to Nottingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Brighton, Stockton, Southampton, Belfast, Cardiff, York, Oxford, Edinburgh, Wolverhampton, Truro, Plymouth, Milton Keynes, Blackpool, Norwich, Hull, Leicester, Leeds and Canterbury.

Running time: Advertised as 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.