Theatre review: Babies

The Other Palace has managed to combine its remit to discover new British musicals with the high school musicals that have been its bread and butter in recent years: Martha Geelan (book) and Jack Godfrey's (music & lyrics) Babies isn't even an adaptation of an existing property, although its premise has been a mainstay of teen TV drama since even I was a teenager: Back then it would most likely have been an egg that each of a class full of kids would have been given to look after as if it was a baby; here Year 11 are delivered a shipment of hi-tech Japanese dolls that cry like real infants and need feeding and care. The class have to look after them for a week while juggling all their usual schoolwork, a cautionary project meant to put them off becoming single teen parents for real, as the entirety of the year above them seem to have done.

Theatre review: Eugenius!

Since its 2016 concert debut Ben Adams & Chris Wilkins' (book, music & lyrics) musical Eugenius! has been popping up in various concerts and full stagings; I have a feeling I was planning to catch its West End transfer, but that became a lockdown casualty. But the show's become known for developing an instant cult following, so instead we now get Hannah Chissick's revival at the Turbine Theatre, which may in fairness be a better home for a comic book musical much of whose appeal comes from a likeably thrown-together feel. Set at some point in the 1980s in a generically John Hughes Ohio high school, Eugene (Elliott Evans) is a bullied geek who dreams of an intergalactic superhero called Tough Man (Dominic Andersen) and his evil nemesis Lord Hector (understudy Louis Doran) by night, and turns the stories into comic books by day.