Theatre review: Police Cops: The Musical

A painfully silly musical spoofing 80s pop culture, whose uniformly talented cast includes an impossibly attractive man with comedy facial hair whose clothes keep falling off? Well I can't see what's in it for me. Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson, Tom Roe (book & lyrics) and Ben Adams' (music) Police Cops: The Musical is another in the long line of 1980s tributes/spoofs whose popularity doesn't seem to show any signs of fading, although you'd have to put quite a few of those other shows together to match the sheer relentless stream of gags the company (whose writer-performer trio's company also goes by Police Cops - unusually, no director is credited so presumably they're doing that as well) throw into this spoof of American cop shows and movies, and the action genre more broadly - Lethal Weapon is probably the most obvious comparison, but there's nods to Die Hard, The Karate Kid and even Back to the Future.

Little Jimmy Johnson (Hunt) vows to become the best Police Cop ever after his sister is shot dead in crossfire, but by the time he grows up the legendary chief Juanita Gonzalez (Natassia Bustamante) has been shunted off the force, replace by the racist, sexist Malloy (Parkinson.)

Malloy pairs rookie Johnson with the grizzled Harrison (Roe,) who teaches him to think with his balls, while Johnson helps him regain his lost enthusiasm for the job, as they go after notorious Mexican crime lord Hernandez, who is pretty transparently a distraction created by the real criminal mastermind, Malloy himself. Alternatively, the real criminal mastermind might be a cat. Needless to say there was no point in me trying to explain the plot, since it's all but irrelevant.

Instead it's just something to hang a relentless stream of jokes on, with the opening song really setting the show's stall up as skewering a very American '80s style of cop show, and the popular tropes in general: Over the course of the evening we get numerous references to guns solving everything, American exceptionalism (with a side of casual racism against Mexicans,) and that character you've never seen before who inexplicably starts a slow clap when the hero has a breakthrough.

It's a musical, so Adams' songs deliver both some rousing music and the writers' deranged lyrics (Melinda Orengo as Rosa has an entire song wishing she could do something more important with her life, instead of her current job caring for sick and disadvantaged children) but there really isn't any opportunity for a gag missed. With more cutaways than an episode of Family Guy, the unending stream of funny lines is complemented by visual gags and physical comedy. Roe has an extended clowning sequence involving a fake table that's as masterful as it is ridiculous, right up there with Charlie Stemp and Tom Edden's mirror routine for breathing fresh life into a classic gag. As for his one-man luchador fight, words finally fail me.

Don't sit too close to the centre of the front row if you don't like audience participation: There isn't much except for one audience member for whom there absolutely is really, really a lot of participation. I did actually get my own minor bit of audience participation, in that every scene where Harrison was smoking a cigarette ended with him throwing it at me then apologising (even as someone who's largely based his reviews around getting inapproproate crushes on actors I was slightly blown away by how attractive Roe is, so if I choose to interpret this as flirting you can't stop me.)

So it won't be surprising if I appreciated another running gag that sees him and Hunt regularly have their shirts fall off and reveal them to be surprisingly buff, but frankly the entire cast of five is clearly at peak fitness given the amount of acrobatics they get up to. This musical couldn't be less like The Clockmaker's Daughter except in the fact that both had me already wondering when I could go back before the first song had even finished. Apart from anything else, I was laughing too hard to catch all the jokes first time round, and given the sheer relentless amount of jokes, it's amazing how good the hit rate is. It's utterly insane genius. Also there's babies on bungee cords.

Police Cops: The Musical by Zachary Hunt, Nathan Parkinson, Tom Roe and Ben Adams is booking until the 14th of October at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith.