Fun at the Beach… review – weird, but sometimes blitheful

There’s no place like the Off-West End: arguably the lifeblood of London’s unique theatre landscape. It’s where musicals as earnestly unhinged as Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-A-Lomp!! can find a sandy place to land – even if the results are somewhat wide of the mark.

The premise is the hook here: a group of free-wheelin’ kids assemble at the seaside for a light-hearted competition to win “King or Queen of the Beach”. But with something of a murderous twist, everything falls slightly awry: in theory it’s essentially Alice in Borderland meets Barbie with the musical novelty of Grease. 

Writers Brandon Lambert and Martin Landry have a fun point of departure to layer on kooky tropes and meta-narrative musings. It is all pleasingly briskly paced at a neat 85-minutes, with the cast hamming it up to pork belly levels in wafer-thin characterisations. There were some fun additions with riffs on classic tunes from the ‘50s and ‘60s: “Big Girls Don’t Cry” becomes “Mature Women Don’t Whine”, while there are odes to the Beatles, the Temptations and, of course, the Beach Boys.

Brass tax though: large chunks of the show are intolerably unfunny – indulgent to the point of crying out for a dramaturg. Director Mark Bell could have cut 10 minutes from the piece and it would’ve been all the more gleeful. A littoral litany of jokes failed to land, while an extended bit about bird squawking makes the ear drums weep. Occasionally the piece feels like an improv group’s bloated fever dream – a love train desperately trying to lay down its own tracks as it progresses.

When it hits the sweet spot between surreality and sunnily humourous, a belly laugh or two does come forth. I’d even go so far as to say that I loved the attempt far more than the result. It wasn’t this critic’s cup of tea, but hopefully there’s a cult fandom ready to lap it up: the theatre world will always be a better place when shows try and don’t succeed, rather than never try at all.