It feels odd to give a much-loved kids’ TV character a critical hosing: but this one, at least, can soak it up. The endlessly cheerful aquatic buffoon SpongeBob Squarepants has been a family favourite since he first appeared on Nickelodeon in 1999, the ten-minute TV animations spawning three feature films. But the antics of this jaunty Aplysina Fistularis – yes, I looked it up – and his underwater mates don’t translate into a 150-minute musical. Especially one with a clunkily contemporary political message, where all the money has been spent on a strange assortment of famous names rather than on the staging.
The show, which premiered in Chicago in 2016 and New York in 2017, features 13 original songs written by artists as diverse as The Flaming Lips, Sara Bareilles and John Legend – though most of them sound uniformly bland. SpongeBob and his mates, gormless starfish Patrick and irrepressible squirrel Sandy, are played by able young musical-theatre professionals. But single-celled villain Sheldon J Plankton is bigged up by drag queen Davina De Campo. Pop Idol’s Gareth Gates plays the sourly bleating octopus Squidward at some performances: I saw his alternate, Celebs Go Dating’s Tom Read Wilson.
