Geek! A New Musical, predictable but charming

A scene from Geek! A New Musical at the Tristan Bates Theatre

Running at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London until May 18.

When a musical’s title fails to deliver once, it can be disappointing. Twice, and it starts to look deliberate. Geek! A New Musical is not really about geeks. And while it’s technically a new musical, it treads such familiar ground that it hardly feels original.

Set in Sarah Michelle Gellar High – named after the lead actress in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a TV series that, with just one musical episode in its seven-season history, nevertheless manages to eclipse this effort by some considerable margin – Scott Morgan’s musical revolves around high school mean girl Tiffy Joy and her entourage’s attempts to win a high school beauty pageant by proxy, enticing the plain new girl to turn herself into a superficial beauty by enticing her with the promise of popularity.

So far, so predictable. Indeed, it’s a furrow so well-ploughed that even the script acknowledges the debt it owes to older, better written movies and plays. And yet, every time you feel your eyes rolling at yet another hackneyed plot twist, every time you find yourself mouthing the characters’ next lines ahead of them because you know instinctively what’s coming next, you can’t help but be swept up in its charm, too.

In the main part, that’s down to the enthusiastic and exuberant young cast, clearly determined to make Geek! the best musical it can possibly be. As spoilt pink princess Tiffy Joy, Lea Marinelli does her utmost to rise above the script, demanding sympathy in a role which would otherwise be hard to like. Elsewhere, the greatest appeal is to be had within the supporting cast, be it Harry Cooper-Miller’s ungainly jock with a barely concealed crush on Tiffy’s out gay friend, or Bradley Richardson as the camp object of his affection.

CJ de Mooi’s drag turn as alcoholic teacher Ms Axel embodies both the best and the worst of the show: simultaneously so outrageous that her every scene is often hilariously memorable, yet so outlandish that, even in a show which clearly has no interest in subtlety, threatens to tip it wholesale into the territory of bad pastiche. Conversely, Ciaran O’Driscoll’s scene-stealing dual roles as geek Remus and goth girl Donna mark him out as a fearsome talent to watch out for in future.

Musically, Morgan’s ear for pastiche shows an appreciation for the genre, but it is when he lets his romantic side show that the musical really demonstrates the potential that is lost elsewhere. The biggest duet of the evening, between the newly beautified plain Jane (Anna Haresnape) and Tiffy’s brother Billy Bob (Danny Whitehead) shows that Morgan can do far better than a cheap send-up of high school musicals can let him express.

And ultimately, that’s Geek!’s problem in a nutshell. It wants to be an affectionate dig at a genre, while remaining part of it, much as Scream did with horror movies. But ultimately, it opts too often for the cheap laugh, the single entendre, the obsession with teenage attitudes to sex. It’s not the Scream of high school musicals – it’s the Scary Movie 5.

Scott Matthewman