“Viva Forever!” savaged by critics

What do you get when you cross the Spice Girls with the West End? Well, as displayed recently with that very hybrid of Viva Forever!, what you get is a mauling as brutal as when fashion critics first saw mens leather sandals.

Critics said it was ‘drudgy’ had ‘iffy backdrops’ and generally lacked the pizzazz of the Spice Girl brand. Jennifer Saunders was hired by Judy Cramer (creator of Mamma Mia) to write the script. Unfortunately despite being a brilliant writer, Saunders kept a little too much AbFab in the storyline without the flair of Joanna Lumley or indeed her own brilliant witticisms.

Sulky Posh

Perhaps Posh suspected as much, her sour face certainly said it all at the opening ceremony. She also arrived on her own, wishing to remain distanced from the rest of the group. This is a woman who has spent a lifetime conserving her sculptured image, moving to the States in the hope she will step out of her husband’s shadow and become a superstar (again) in her own right. So it’s no surprise that she would be warier of the extravaganza than the rest of the group as in comparison to them, she has more to lose. When the spice girls came on stage at the end, Posh stood away from the group, and unsurprisingly Geri dressed in a Disney princess ball gown complete with women’s sandals, babbled down the microphone like a child on Christmas morning.

As the critics rain on their musical parade, claiming the songs to be exposed as the ‘weak’ poor attempts at lyricism certainly won’t help any of their reputations. The weak storyline, where a group of sexy young girls enter an X-factor style competition just reminds us how vacuous these reality type programmes are. Plus the back stories lack substance, satisfying conclusion and are used as lead-ins for their songs.

What about the Fans?

Speaking of the songs, The Guardian even goes so far as saying that the songs were “murdered either by the set-up…or the arrangement.”  The only section of the musical where the energy is super high is the finale, a medley of spice girl songs. Will this be enough for the thousands of spice girl fans who have already bought tickets and the many more of them who will receive them as Christmas presents? At £80 a pop, let’s hope that they will be entertained by what has already been called a West End flop.