Edinburgh Fringe musicals and opera reviews: Nerds | Escape Room | Daddy, Tomorrow Will I Be a Man?

Nerds ★★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 25 August

It has taken Nerds almost ten years to recover from a financial pasting on the verge of its Broadway run, dogged by false fiscal promises and subsequent lawsuits which inspired the Hollywood Reporter to hail it “the Fyre Festival of musicals”. Anyone would think there was a hot new product at stake which would revolutionize life as we know it….

Thankfully, Nerds has recovered from its playground dust-up to emerge as one of the most fun shows on this year’s Fringe, tracing the epic rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from their days presenting PC prototypes at the Homebrew Computer Club through the peaks and troughs of Silicon Valley to their triumphant moments on the Microsoft and Apple mountaintops. And what better way to tell the story than through the medium of jazz hands musical

Nerds is (almost) as smart as the men it satirises. Gates, played to fusspot perfection by Dan Buckley, is the classic preppy introvert. He may have been bullied in childhood, but he’s a heck of a singer. Kane Oliver Parry matches him as a preening Jobs, the pot-smoking hippie visionary who reinvents himself as a steely businessman. Their respective partners, Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak, are played as dispensable sidekicks in a world where the girls all wear glasses and are there to crush on the digital geniuses despite being the smartest guys in the room.

Cue lots of coding metaphors and sassy (algo)rhythms as Gates and Jobs enter their almighty tussle for techno and marketing supremacy. Jobs literally gives a rock’n’roll presentation at the 1984 launch of the Mackintosh computer, while Windows is introduced with a dorky hip-hop number. Word to Word. No bugs or buffering here - this is slick and consistently witty fare from an immaculately drilled eight-strong ensemble who know they’ve got a comeback hit.

Fiona Shepherd

Footballer’s Wives: The Musical ★★★

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 24 August

ITV’s early 2000’s trash TV series is actually fine material for a musical makeover with its glitz, glamour and the near-operatic levels of bitchiness evinced by its led character Tanya Turner. Wife of the captain of fictional club Earl’s Court F.C. Turner (the dynamic Ceili O’Connor) here schemes to save her husband’s career — and maintain her status — in the face of new transfers and younger WAGs. Turner makes for a formidable antiheroine, a character so Machiavellian that cannot help but root for her and O’Connor’s powerful voice and undeniable star presence drive the show.

The downside is that whenever O’Connor is not on stage, the narrative starts to drag. The subplots — and secondary characters — are hardly compelling and while the songs by Kath Gotts are fine, there are no real stand-outs . Even Turner’s big numbers are unlikely to get your toes tapping — although she does sell the absolute hell out of them.

It’s suitably vulgar without being particularly funny with it and even Arlene Phillips’ choreography looks well-drilled rather than exciting. Ultimately, the show is like a well-manicured hand job from a WAG (one imagines); perfectly serviceable, thoroughly professional and, indeed, quite pleasant at times but you’ll struggle to remember much about it in the morning.

Rory Ford

Escape Room: The Musical ★★★

Just the Tonic at The Caves (Venue 88) until 24 August

Once passionate devotees of escape rooms, six university pals receive mysterious anonymous invitations to reassemble for one final challenge, after their friendships have lapsed for a couple of years. But the tricks and puzzles they’re solving seem to have uncanny parallels in unresolved issues from the group’s days of study.

Tom Rolph and Michael Rincon’s likeable musical has a neat set-up, and the creators come up with an enjoyably daft collection of characters to spin out their storyline’s threads of petty competition, unspoken rivalry and – of course – unrequited love. Musical numbers are effective (although repeating two of them wholesale feels a little too much), and choreographers Hermione Lester and Naomi Park’s dance numbers are surprisingly and impressively elaborate.

The characters, though, could do with a fair bit more depth before we feel a proper connection with them, and one love-triangle storyline pushes credulity to breaking point and beyond. And though the fourth wall remains shattered from start to finish of the show (to the extent that ‘audience member’ Pierre – an enjoyably better-than-all-this Frenchman – finds himself part of the action), the meta-theatrics also detract from the puzzle solving, which for a bunch of escape room obsessives seems unconvincingly unimportant. Nonetheless, an entertaining hour with colourful performances.

David Kettle

Daddy Tomorrow Will I Be A Man? is on now at The Space | Daddy Tomorrow Will I Be A Man? is on now at The Space

Daddy, Tomorrow Will I Be a Man? ★★★

theSpace @ Niddry Street (Venue 9) until 23 August

Musical? Personal history? Therapy session? This slight but likeable new musical is clearly a bit of all three for its writer and performer James Willstrop, former world squash champion, and a creditable actor and singer too, even if his projection could be a little stronger across both.

It’s his own life story, from an early love of squash to the later pains of training sessions, plus his parents’ divorce and his own reluctance to embark on a family lest the same thing should happen again. Running through it all, however, is Willstrop’s perpetual questioning of his purpose in life: is it to soar ever higher among sport’s elite players, or is it to drop back down to Earth as a son, husband and (possibly) father?

For someone shifting his relationship with an audience entirely, Willstrop is a naturally confident performer, bringing a lot of boyish charm to his tale, and a nice line in wisecracks too. His songs are functional but not especially memorable, and the intertwining timelines of his plot could be differentiated a little more meaningfully with some smarter direction.

Nonetheless, it’s a captivating hour in the company of a disarmingly sincere man taking on a new challenge in his life, and kudos for that.

David Kettle

Dystopia: The Rock Opera ★★★

Braw Venues @ Grand Lodge (Venue 7) until 16 August

Welcome to the state of Dystopia - as long as you are super-rich or super-compliant. It’s not hard to decode the authoritarian allusions in this satirical rock opera: the band members are wearing Trump, Putin and Kim Jong Un masks for starters. President Blame and his gazillionaire sidekick Oli Flashman preside over a culture of greed and fear but another political force is on the rise with gleaming showman Magnanimous Moon preferring the carrot to the stick. None of it is subtle, but neither is pomp rock.

Show creators Beldon Haigh may not boast a War of the Worlds-style orchestral backing but they do have a church organ in their venue and they’re gonna use it to embellish the standard classic rock sound, with diversions into blues, prog and Latin rock.

More impressive are the visuals, with lyrics projected on to screens in the style of Soviet propaganda posters, designed by band members Justin Skelton and Willie Logan. Singer/co-narrator Fiona Lynch is the vocal powerhouse of the operation, while multi-instrumentalist Dru Baker adds comic acting skills to what emerges overall as a rather scrambled maximalist mix of ideas.

Fiona Shepherd