HERE & NOW review: Steps jukebox musical is utterly steptacular

It’s 12 years since the Spice Girls’ musical Viva Forever was swiftly ‘viva for-over’ after six months on the West End. It remains the most fascinating of failures. The band’s all-conquering stadium tour six years later proved an army of fans were still with them, after all. And that iconic discography – including an admittedly sparse 11 singles – could still go down a storm at Glastonbury, surely. A one-two slam of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ and ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ to open? Come on!

The creators of Here & Now, however, have gone to every length to ensure no such blip tarnishes Steps’s legacy. Rather than an all-guns-blazing debut, they’ve opted for a soft launch of sorts at Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre, where Attitude caught the show last month. Next, a UK and Ireland tour, with a West End run to follow.

The roll-out out suggests business savvy, offering scope for show refinement and hype generation without the pressure of filling a gigantic, expensive London theatre right off the bat. No shade to The Devil Wears Prada, which has just done the exact opposite (and, to its credit, seems precision-engineered to fly) but Here & Now‘s trajectory should be different. It reflects the optimism, perseverance and power of self-belief of Ian ‘H’ Watkins, Claire Richards, Lisa Scott-Lee, Lee Latchford-Evans and Faye Tozer – a band still scoring number one albums 25 years later. They know exactly what they’re doing, and an indefinite, Mamma Mia!-style West End residency is still to play for when the music remains this strong and the production itself this polished.

Thank goodness the book – a pleasingly low-stakes story about four friends looking for love while working at seaside supermarket Better Best Bargains; think Sex and the City in a parallel universe – was written by an actual Steps fan, for starters. Shaun Kitchener understands the true value of the band’s underrated, ABBA-adjacent back catalogue: the gloriously silly ‘Last Thing on My Mind’, the resplendently beautiful ‘One for Sorrow’ and the fabulously dark, Gaga-foreshadowing ‘Deeper Shade of Blue’, for example, all of which deserve a new lease of life. 

Kitchener’s alchemy with the songs and their themes is such that he finds hidden depths among them, most powerfully when recasting the campy romantic ballad ‘Heartbeat’ into a stripped-back elegy from a mother to a stillborn child lost decades before. (“You are only a heartbeat away.”) Rebecca Lock as main character Caz sings the song with such haunting restraint, as opposed to the self-aware emotional intensity of Steps in the 90s, that the song in its new form is a revelation.

This sweet sadness mined from a quiet, reflective moment in an everyday woman’s life is one of the biggest surprises this reviewer has ever experienced in the theatre. Especially given Here & Now had already laid out its narrative table as a frothy affair akin to a teatime soap, or so I thought. (But if you’ve seen that Dot and Ethel scene from EastEnders, or that Jack and Vera scene from Coronation Street, you’ll know soaps can also serve emotional wallops worthy of opera.)

Kitchener does it again with ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’, once more elevated from overly sentimental origins and performed as a coming out anthem by Sharlene Hector as Vel, her absolutely joyous – and I mean joyous – voice strong and beautiful as she declares her love for a female friend.

Not every song is repurposed quite so elegantly, or sung quite so exceptionally, of course. One crowd-pleaser in particular, which should have been the penultimate number, lands with a thud in both performance and placement. But like Steps themselves, there’s something perfectly imperfect about even the show’s shortcomings. The way the Marmite-like ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ for example, is shoehorned in to soundtrack Better Best Bargains’ hoedown-themed sale. As one of the biggest-selling singles never to make the top 10, this truly bizarre song was itself shoehorned into popular culture, and its use here raises a knowing smile rather than an eyebrow.

There are many more quietly hilarious details, such as shelves that frame the stage, artfully stocked with everyday essentials like… toilet paper. The staging generally is pristine, and vividly lit in neon pinks and blues, almost like a TV-set, as a tireless troupe of dancers serve a celebration for the eyes. If only every high street supermarket were this aesthetically pleasing.

Full marks, too for the unforced LGBTQ representation, lovingly folded into the mix rather than studded on like rhinestones. Vel coming out later in life, and late in the show, is handled with such subtlety that this reviewer couldn’t quite predict it. There’s generational contrast, too, in the quiet confidence of Blake Patrick Anderson as hook-up-loving Robbie, a charming, puppyish gay-boy-next-door. (The cheerful ‘Say You’ll Be Mine’ fits him like a glove.) Drag Race UK star River Medway, finally, serves another facet of queerness, and an array genderqueer fashion, as Robbie’s plucky love interest, Jem.

Young Robbie, it transpires, is estranged from his dad, and the way he is swept up into the loving arms of his three female friends, two of them much older, feels like a novel take on found family cliches. Beyond this, queerphobia is lightly discussed but not depicted, which could prove healing for middle-aged LGBTQs who grew up on Steps.

One hopes it will send an inspiring message to modern LGBTQ youth, too, as society becomes somehow more and less accepting of queerness at once. One thing’s for sure: if this show charms the nation, as it should, it could really make a difference.