It could only happen in the 90s: a chart-bound boyband launching their careers with a musical that dramatises the cynical creation of boybands. That mind-bending context is far more interesting than the show's content, a shamelessly schematic chronicle of five former shelf-stackers' career curve from audition to world domination.
The likeable lads, who become known as Freedom, are assembled by a sneaky svengali (Bryan Murray), who draws them up a contract that would shame Fagin, and takes possession of their independence. Early success disintegrates as Freedom's component parts assert themselves: the ringleader is Daniel Crossley's testy Danny, who finds, like Robbie Williams before him, that shaking one's tush is no way for a young man to earn a living. And so, what was once a boy band evolves into "an alcoholic, a drug addict, a dad and a friend of Dorothy".
For now, Freedom have only the identity dictated by Peter Quilter's script, in which nothing unpredictable happens, with considerable pizzazz. Its self-reflexive streak is honed by a production that credibly recreates the band's turns on Top of the Pops, at Wembley Stadium and - in video clips screened on a giant upstage telly - on their tour-bus and on news bulletins too.
As in Mamma Mia! (which reviews rather than previews a hit band's material), the songs are the thing here, and Freedom perform their above-average white-boy slop-pop with panache. Quilter's is a script that, far from condemning their vacuity and craving for fame, courts sympathy and support. And why might that be? Because Boyband is nothing more or less than an ingenious promo for a band and an album we will be hearing plenty more of very soon.
