Willy’s Candy Spectacular: A Musical Parody – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Picture: David Monteith-Hodge

Willy’s Candy Spectacular: A Musical Parody continues at the Pleasance Dome – King Dome until 26 August 2024.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

It’s a novelty to be presented with a programme on your way into a Fringe show. It’s even more of a novelty to be given a ‘scratch and sniff’ card to use whenever prompted. Very 1970s!

But a novelty is a clue to what this show truly is – a novelty with bells on.

Featuring the original movie’s Veruca Salt, the lovely Julie Dawn Cole, resplendent in red sequins with a white ‘fur’ stole, narrates the action alongside Kirsty Paterson – the official Sad Scottish Oompa Loompa from the Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience in Glasgow. They create a few nice moments between them and are eminently likeable.

However, despite repeated references to ‘the fiasco in Glasgow’, this is written by American writers for American actors, losing the ‘Glasgow’ apart from the conniving Willy figure, Eric Petersen, who has a broad Scottish ‘stage voice’.  Perhaps the entire show could be contrived as a ‘dream/nightmare sequence’ imagining what would happen had this taken place in Anytown, USA.

There are a few decent moments: this is an undoubtedly talented singing and dancing cast with a very varied score to convey. There are no fewer than 10 songwriters listed as creators of the 15 songs in the show. Perhaps this is partly why there becomes an almost episodic structure to the show. The cast works extremely hard, doing the best they can against the overly-loud pre-recorded backing track that sounds as if there are extra vocals on it too.

The scope to develop the music is plain to hear. The calibre of singers on the stage means they are perfectly capable of a few more harmonies and a bit more dynamic delivery.

Quite where David Hasselhoff fits in is difficult to say – but he does feature and is not an hallucination induced by scratch and sniff.

It is very, very funny at times:

JULIE DAWN COLE: For some moments in life, there are no words.

SAD OOMPA LOOMPA: (deadpan) Bet ye there’s a song though.

The musical number featuring glove puppets is also genuinely funny and well-placed.

Perhaps there is an element of their Willy’s philosophy we ought to bear in mind and not begin with such high expectations.

Fiona Orr