The Cast of SNAP at King's Head Theatre. Photo by Stuart Yeatman.Max (Matteo Giambiasi) swivelling in his office chair tapping away at the laptop perched on…his lap, is a photographer who has apparently just landed a huge ad campaign for tea. This exceedingly unlikely fact has caused his megalomania to kick-in and he begins channeling his inner Italian Bond villain, speaking to his girlfriend/assistant Sheila (Justine Marie Mead) dismissively and generally being obnoxious whilst accepting Jaffa Cakes. Apparently his motivation for the rudeness, is a desire to push poor Sheila into the arms of a young pretty boy Tom (Will Usherwood-Bliss) whom he is lining-up to front his ad campaign whose concept is a sequence of in-the-buff-with-tea-pot images. As a side hustle, Max intends reigniting passions with another woman Angela (Hayley Maybury) who happens to be in a relationship with the aforementioned Tom. Make sense? No, not really. But don’t let minor considerations like character motivation and trajectory hold you back from staging a musical.
Up to this moment, we’ve only seen Tom as an awkward and self-doubting youth, perpetually playing on his Gameboy console having lost his mojo. Suddenly, he’s writhing and strutting in his underpants before Max’s creepy lens, having found the meaning of life. Max and Angela have a night under the covers due to her misunderstanding of a one-letter text message mix-up (I want to dump you/jump you) and of course Tom and Sheila also do the deed. So there we have it, in a nutshell. Two couples swap partners due to a flash of underpants and a misconstrued text message.
If you’ve read this far, describing the book as weak and poorly structured, is hardly going to be a revelation. The music is marginally better in places and offers a glimmer of hope for Mr O’Brien’s future but his lyrics are truly beyond redemption and it is an unforgivable cruelty to performers to require that they utter the embarrassing drivel I endured on opening night. I’ve oodles of sympathy for the four performers trying their very best to squeeze something meaningful out of this trite, clunky and wholly amateurish effort.
It may seem the height of presumption for a reviewer to go beyond critiquing existing work by offering a suggestion to the creative team, but here goes. One word: collaborate. You simply are not Stephen Sondheim. Find a subject, find a lyricist and work up some material. Hone it, fine tune it, develop it, get input from producers, performers and then, only then, dare to put it before the paying public. To ignore these basic fundamental steps, is to damn any potential you may have. It’s the best I can do. Take it or leave it and I genuinely wish you the very best of luck.
