Under a stark spotlight a woman sings an ode to her stillborn son who was “born sleeping” 13 years previously. “You are only a heartbeat away,” she sings. “And my love one day will find you.” It’s a beautiful, sombre moment, made all the more moving by the fact that 10 minutes earlier the same character was line-dancing to dance-pop hoedown 5,6,7,8 with a giant cardboard cutout of a cactus on her head.
Welcome to the whiplash world of Here & Now, the latest in a lengthy line of jukebox musicals based around pop back catalogues. This one – directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, with a book by Shaun Kitchener – fuses the myriad hits of Steps on to a storyline based in a seaside supermarket, Better Best Bargains. There we find best friends Caz (an excellent Rebecca Lock), Vel (Jacqui Dubois), Robbie (Blake Patrick Anderson) and Neeta (Rosie Singha), each determined to have a “summer of love” and change their lives while dealing with, variously, useless straight men, pesky adoption agencies, anxiety, latent homosexuality, daddy issues, and via an odd end-of-act-one twist, a faux French ladies man turned capitalist landlord scumbag.
The high street setting – stage designed to evoke a retina-burning, poppers o’clock rendering of the Supermarket Sweep set drawn from memory – is the perfect backdrop to riff on accidental family dynamics and cross-generational friendships. At times, as the often very funny one-liners hit their mark, it reminded me of Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies, only spiked with the energy of a Zumba class.
As ever with a jukebox musical, the plot is ultimately just a vehicle for the songs. Luckily, Steps – to their detractors a sort of Asda Price Abba – have enough bangers, bops and ballads to cover all bases: the bittersweet One for Sorrow soundtracks a toxic reunion; Scared of the Dark’s galloping drama elevates a moment of tension, and a barnstorming Chain Reaction is performed on top of a washing machine by a drag queen dressed as a bag of ice. You just don’t get that with Les Mis.
Like Steps themselves – whose surprise appearance on stage tonight is actually one of the show’s more low-key moments – Here & Now is camp, silly, heartfelt, sporadically exhausting but ultimately just endlessly entertaining.
