Fashion Victim – the Musical!: daft camp with a warm heart

Fashion Victim — the Musical!. There’s a title that’s been waiting to be used for ages. The Cinema Museum is a frumpy warehouse, tucked away in a Kennington backwater, crammed with big-screen memorabilia. A cobwebby salon fitted with a catwalk serves as the theatre. Charmingly camp Carl Mullaney kicks things off by introducing the cast as if they’re already Hollywood legends. Which they are. In their heads.

The storyline is eccentric and a little out of step with the world it seeks to mock. A Canadian wannabe, Mimi Steel, descends on London determined to become a superstar. She seduces a Parisian hunk, Cedric Chevalier, whose list of contacts is sufficiently high-powered to confer success on anyone. Mimi nicks his address book and persuades his VIP chums to help her launch her career with a new charity bracelet. But her master-plan implodes when the Fashion Police raid her launch party and arrest her for ‘wearing a fleece without a licence’.

Sounds pretty clunky? That’s deliberate. And the acting is heightened to the point of absurdity and beyond. The handsome performers strut around the catwalk, pouting and sneering, and cranking out smart, brittle wisecracks. ‘A girl’s got to thrust to earn her crust,’ says a starlet. And she illustrates her point with a groin-ram that could shatter a roof tile. It’s all presented as an elaborate in-joke. ‘We’re too smart to care about these flimsy airheads or their silly plans,’ wink the actors. Fair enough. But a great musical makes the audience care passionately about the characters and their destinies. And if you dispense with those golden assets you give yourself a massive deficit to make up.

There are compensations. The music is good. Some is excellent. Tunesmith Toby Rose knows how to bang out a big show-stopping number as well as a sweet, melancholy ballad.