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Teenage hormones run hot and heavy through this rambunctious Australian musical, which is by turns very smart and very, very silly. Written by Yve Blake, Fangirls both mocks and celebrates the obsessive passions teenage girls conceive for members of boybands, which have been assembled to generate precisely that reaction.
The show hangs sharp and sensitive observations, punchy songs and robust Antipodean wit on a plot that, as a late lyric suggests, is “so fake it was just embarrassing”. Unlike Six, with which it shares a raucous, yass-kween feminism, Fangirls doesn’t quite transcend its innate daftness.
Not for the want of trying by director Paige Rattray or a young and diverse cast featuring all sorts of body-shapes, ethnicities and pronouns, mind you. Together they generate an atmosphere more like a gig than a musical, whipping up the whooping crowd into Mexican waves and arms-aloft singalongs. Fangirls was a hit in Oz and its London staging was hotly anticipated. Indeed, most of those hotly anticipating it seemed to have been bussed in for opening night.
The plot? Oh, all right then. Edna (Jasmine Elcock, a gifted singer and physical comedian) is a 14-year-old scholarship girl living with her mum in straitened Sydney circumstances. She, her friends, and an international online community with whom she shares bonkers fanfiction are all obsessed with floppy-haired Yorkshireman Harry, breakout heartthrob of confected five-piece Heartbreak Nation.
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Suddenly, the band announces Australian dates on a world tour for – OhmaGAD! – AU$139.95.
The lyric “you’re on the backs of my eyelids, the folds of my brain, you’ve ruined my life and made my day,” sung by octave-scaling Gracie McGonigal, is as succinct a summation of bittersweet fandom as you’re likely to find.
Harry’s anthem, Nobody, wouldn’t disgrace a real boyband, and Disgusting, about the challenges of being a teenage girl, is piercingly acute. There’s a great knockabout number, Night of Our Lives sung by Edna’s frenemies Jules and Brianna.
The tone is wryly compassionate but never mawkish: Jules (Mary Malone, hilarious) is a bitch because her divorcing parents are trying to buy her affection; Brianna (Miracle Chance, winningly ditzy) is concerned about her mismatched boobs.
Blake makes clear that idolatry is a pressure valve for complex feelings and sudden adult awareness: a seemingly offhand reference to domestic abuse hits home. Conversely, her book and lyrics make merry with bodily functions, unformed sexual cravings and, in one song, the torture fantasies of jealous fans.
The dancing is dynamic, the singing largely good, the design a pulsating mix of music-video graphics and deranged close ups projected onto three curved screens. But the veil of kookiness covering a thin, derivative plot really bugged me.
Sonia Friedman, who has co-produced Fangirls with the Lyric, clearly thinks it has commercial legs. Let’s see. This viewing left me a cautious admirer, rather than an outright fanatic.
