To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, each man loves the thing he kills. Kevin! (The Musical) was birthed with a murder in mind, one plotted by writer, Will Sharland.
At the time, Sharland loathed musical theatre. What better way, he reasoned, to demonstrate his hatred than to devise a kind of anti-musical, one which sang out his rancour and shimmied to his malice? It might even make a killing.
There was, of course, a twist in the tale. Over the course of the decade and more it has taken to bring that first black light bulb of inspiration to the stage at Manchester’s Z-arts, Sharland has succumbed to the genre, becoming besotted by its undeniability. In time-honoured fashion, it is he who has become the victim.
There’s something of Sharland in Kevin, his hero; an English foreign exchange student cast into a kind of Main Street America, with all the familiarity of a movie set. Jet-lagged, and with his medication lost in transition, Kevin finds himself adrift amid the caffeinated perk and primary coloured surfaces; disorientated, above all, by his classmates’ disconcerting penchant for breaking out into impromptu song and dance at the drop of a baseball cap.
Perhaps worse, the only individual who seems to share his bewilderment with this stagey oddness is the tellingly-named McGuffin, the town down-and-out. Afflicted by a somewhat wayward Scottish accent, he rails against the tropes that tether him to a musical production in a manner oddly reminiscent of The KLF‘s Bill Drummond biting the hands that fed him at the Brit Awards in 1992.
To the consternation of Kevin, and the credit of Sharland, the songs themselves, in particular the hookworm that is We Can Achieve Our Targets, are blessed with the kind of immediacy and memorability that endure into the bus ride home and beyond. Moreover, the musical performances themselves are uniformly excellent. Elena Whiteley as Chase, the student with whom Kevin is lodged, convincingly traces their character arc from Sponge Bob perkiness to depths much murkier than Bikini Bottom, while all the time locating the emotional depths in the lyric.
Of course, the spotlight which inevitably casts an unflattering shadow over all subsequent high school musicals is the still undimmed brilliance of the first season of Glee. With time on his side, Ryan Murphy, the series’ writer and director, could allow his characters to unravel, revealing the tangle of their complexities. In the more abbreviated time frame of Kevin!, his own dramatis personae appear truncated in comparison. Charlotte Naylor’s Cindi, in particular, deserves the space to shed the chrysalis of Chase’s unrequited affection that her performance does so much to cast aside.
Likewise, while it opens with an inspired pastiche which plays up the way that the choreography of West Side Story undermines any supposed sense of threat in its ‘rumbles’ between the Jets and the Sharks, the plot lines which Sharland has so carefully laid, like so much theatrical gunpowder, in the first act don’t quite come off. Rather than a grand finale, worthy of the fourth of July, the result is more like a salvo of smaller explosions.
For me, Kevin! is more successful in its metafictional moments, as a kind of Truman Show Tune, than as an assassination of what little character can be attributed to the current incumbent of the White House and a Spitting Image-like satire on the misogyny cultured by Incel influencers. Even so, there’s something in such inconsistencies which gleams like the uncut spark of cult appeal.
Over-sized, over-stated and simply over, at least for the time being, it’s easy to imagine Kevin! being revived for new audiences, in new towns, maybe even in the New World.
