18/08/24

King Dome, Assembly, Edinburgh

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past six months, you’ll doubtless be aware of the ill-fated Willy Wonka Experience held in Glasgow back in February. You’ll surely have read about the ensuing travesty, how parents stumped up £35 for tickets and were incensed when their kids were handed a couple of jelly beans in a near-empty warehouse.

And you’ll have seen the image of young actor, Kirsty Paterson, shoddily dressed as an Oompah Loompah, standing behind a wooden counter/meth lab, looking thoroughly depressed. That meme subsequently went viral and gave Hollywood director Andy Fickman an idea for a new Edinburgh show…

Ironically, a production built around a real-life disaster has already had more than its own fair share of turmoil, with the cast decimated in its opening week by a bout of COVID. But now they’ve got through that and here we sit amidst a sell-out crowd at the King Dome – and the lights go down.

Guitars and drums pump out the opening number at ear-splitting volume (the sound mix is eventually sorted out), ‘David Hasselhoff’ (Wilkie Ferguson) belts out the lyrics while a couple of glitter-clad dancers strut their stuff around him. The song ends and on comes Julie Dawn-Cole (who played Veruca Salt opposite Gene Wilder in the 1971 movie) as our sardonic narrator. She’s accompanied by the actual Kirsty Paterson, who gets to make the occasional remark, but is still pretty glum because not one, not two, but three actors have been employed to impersonate her, while she stands around like a spare part.

Well, that’s theatre for you.

But the show must go on and now here comes the fictional version of event-organiser, Billy Coull. He’s Willy the Impresario (Eric Peterson), here to explain, through the medium of song, exactly what he thought he was doing. Swindling people, I guess, though the lyrics seem to let him off the hook somewhat. Because he did have good intentions. (Did he?)

If sheer energy could make a Fringe hit, then Willy’s Candy Spectacular would be home and dry. But the problem is that this is a show that’s been created solely to parody the crap event that inspired it. Having established that in the first fifteen minutes, it really doesn’t have anywhere left to go. The inevitable result is that it all feels a bit one-note. No matter how hard Peterson and his supporting cast strive to keep things peppy, no matter how many gimmicks are thrown into the mix (scratch and sniff cards anyone?), the show never really takes flight.

There’s perhaps the only positive song about AI I’ve ever witnessed (ably performed by Nicole Greenwood) and a sweet ballad sung by Monica Evans explaining that kids can be entertained by the unlikeliest things, but the fifteen songs have been put together by ten songwriters and, though they get your toes tapping, they don’t really cohere. In fairness, I think I should add that today’s audience shows every sign of enjoying themselves and the applause at the conclusion is enthusiastic.

But I can’t help feeling that the disparate parts of this production don’t quite add up to the feel-good entertainment it so obviously wants to be.

3 stars

Philip Caveney