Harold Pinter Theatre: Charing Cross
Eschewing more fashionable modern operating systems, impresario Anselm Philpott has taken a bold step in choosing the “unmusicable” Windows 98 over Vista.
Google – which most experts agree lends itself more naturally to the musical theatre format, was seen by many as the natural sequel to “Vista – The Musical” his 1996 blockbuster West End hit.
Widely disliked during its supremacy in the mid-90’s, windows 98 was plagued by security holes and used friendliness as a way of inviegling itself onto people’s desktops.
Unfortunately Philpott’s show shares these shortcomings. While there are some genuine stars in the cast, there also some dreadful hacks. “Clippy” the word 98 office assistant paperclip, is woefully miscast and played awfully by Sharon Osborne.
Cues are missed with alarming regularity, which would be forgivable if the original music by Dieter Huehn were more than a derivative hodgepodge of show tune boilerplate and faux R&B signifiers.
This is for Microsoft fanboys and – girls only (Which probably means, depressingly, it will be a hit) My finger is so not on the pulse of the Zeitgeist.
