Nerds musical review – Jobs and Gates as the original keyboard warriors

Mac v PC: the question that launched a thousand arguments. Nerds, a musical fantasia on Silicon Valley’s founding fathers, imagines the two great titans of tech as American high adolescent schoolers. Steve Jobs arrives as a swaggering jock with a rock star strut. Poor Steve Wozniak is trampled underfoot. Bill Gates, by contrast, begins life as a spectacled misfit, only to metamorphose into a cackling despot, presiding over Microsoft as it monopolises the tech industry.

There are moments of gleeful absurdity. Gates delivers a melancholy ballad lamenting his nebbish persona (“when you have four eyes that’s twice as many tears”). Jobs flirts his way through competitors unapologetically stealing his ideas and technology in the name of innovation. The two eventually confront one another in a gloriously camp rap battle.

The writing is quick on its feet, peppered with sly jokes about our screen-addled present and the cultish nature of the “keynote address”. But Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiners’ book and lyrics sidesteps the more vicious truths about Silicon Valley messianism and corporate greed, preferring to poke than to puncture the people that now dominate the headlines.

Still, the cast is first-rate. Kane Oliver Parry brings Jobs to life with louche, Jaggerish swagger, while Dan Buckley turns Gates into a masterclass in tragicomic awkwardness. Around them, the ensemble fizz and crackle, kept in taut formation by Nick Winston’s brisk direction, which charges the production with a constant jolt of electricity.

Nerds is a whip-smart musical romp that crackles with invention and style even if it is far too lenient on the billionaires who are at the helm of modern day empires.