Be More Chill – The Other Palace

Scott Folan and Blake Patrick Anderson in Be More Chill at The Other Palace, London. Picture: Matthew Crockett

Be More Chill continues at The Other Palace, London until 3 May 2020.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

An Off-Broadway sleeper hit that earned itself a full Broadway run, Be More Chill is based on a young adult novel of the same name by Ned Vizzini. Set in an American high school it tells the story of isolated geek Jeremy (Scott Folan) who takes a black-market pill-cum-supercomputer – a Squip – in an attempt to become one of the cool kids.

Navigating the emotional minefield of high school and its various cliques has, of course, been fertile ground for many a long while, in various art forms, musical theatre included. So what, one may wonder, can Be More Chill shine a light on, that High School Musical, Bring It On, Zombie Prom, Heathers, Mean Girls etc. did not?

I am still wondering. Stephen Brack, who has directed the show since its 2015 New Jersey premiere, dials up the cartoonish elements in every character to the extent that one rarely gets to think of some of the supporting characters as anything other than the sole character trait they are given – the gossipy one, the bitchy one, the ditsy one.

True character depth tends to be limited to Folan’s Jeremy and his best friend Michael (Blake Patrick Anderson), a duo whose closeness triggers homophobic jibes from the class bully and which Jeremy rejects as the Squip takes control and tries to mold him into one of the popular kids.

Subtlety is the watchword here – mostly because of its complete absence. From Bobby Frederick Tilley II’s costumes and the animated neon line drawing designer Beowulf Boritt uses in place of a set, this is a 1980s aesthetic gone wild. At least it distracts from the fact that the personified Squip, a digital genie played with arch aloofness by Stewart Clarke, is supposed to be a dead ringer for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. With his constant costume changes from one outlandish robe to another, he far more resembles Jacqueline Pearce’s Servalan from Blake’s 7.

Dodgy aesthetics and the poor rendering of supporting roles are far from unique to Be More Chill of course, and to a certain extent they can be mitigated by an impressive score and a compelling story. Sadly, neither are as present here as the musical’s fervent teenage fans may have you believe. Joe Iconis’ songs have a sound that will be familiar to anyone who’s heard pretty much any Off-Broadway musical of the last couple of decades.

Pretty much every number is elevated by the spirited cast performances of them – the best among these being Folan and Anderson’s duet of ‘Two Player Game’, or Anderson (again) with the musical’s best solo song, ‘Michael in the Bathroom’.

But overall, it’s the tone of the story which mutes the primary colour-laden musical. From the bullying of Jeremy, to the microchip telling him that what he really needs is to be heteronormatively masculine in a particularly toxic way, everything is both so catastrophically predictable and unpleasantly extreme that it becomes hard to root for the hero at all.

And in Act II, as the silicon chip inside Jeremy’s head is set to overload, nearly every step of Joe Tracz’s book is as predictable as it is frustrating. There is also the worry that, while the Squip is obviously a metaphor for teenagers’ attempts to redefine themselves – to ‘fit in’ while losing everything that makes them special and likeable – by externalising this it removes all sense of personal culpability from Jeremy’s shoulders.

The play’s Act II does, at least, introduce some fun elements, including a weird collection of outfits in a Halloween party and a shambolically futuristic reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Those scenes – and an opportunity for Miracle Chance to give depth to her underwritten role of Christine, the girl Jeremy yearns after – just about manage to salvage the whole show from disappearing up its neon-trimmed fundament.

But even then, if you want a tale of teenagers struggling with their hormones and growing pains, in a modern world that has a 1980s aesthetic and which features a hilariously inappropriate Shakespeare adaptation as an end of term school play, one would be better to stay home and watch Sex Education on Netflix.

Scott Matthewman

Tickets for Be More Chill are available HERE.