Gingers! The Musical

In a festival programme that this year includes musicals about online messaging and the porn industry, Gingers! The Musical ran the risk of appearing almost tame by comparison. After all, we’ve all surely heard every ginger joke there is, even those of us not cursed with hair the colour of a discarded garden gate.

So, what could Gingers! offer us that isn’t just cheap parody? The answer is lots more cheap parody – but in the form of innumerable song and dance routines. It would be too easy to say that the performers in Gingers! are on fire, or that at least it appears their hair is, but the truth is the cast of this production are uniformly excellent. Each of them plays a young female redhead drawn from every conceivable youth stereotype; there’s the goth ginger, the fat ginger, the wannabe-WAG ginger, and the secretly gay ginger.

The plot, which is alluded to for, oh, at least the opening thirty seconds, is they have all come together to a retreat for redheads, to try and come to terms with their hair colour. But in a musical like this, storylines are not important. It’s the songs we’re here for, and for the most part they are excellent, such as I’ve got an Obsession with the Ugly One from Girls Aloud.

Some moments can seem a bit too much like youth-theatre, but Gingers! The Musical is none the less an enjoyable romp, a bit throw-away in places, but one that’s certainly worthy of your time and money.