No Love Lost

All Bob’s Women has disappointingly ignored a vital truth: it’s possible for sex to be light-hearted and frothy without being stupid. It’s lazy to flash a lime-green willy and hope it will distract the audience from the steaming pile of atrociousness onstage.

I’ll begin at the beginning. A poster line reading ‘The Sexy New Musical Comedy’, admittedly gave me pre-conceptions. I was ready for what I thought it might be - a Sex and the City vibe perhaps, which would then make me their target audience, primed and ready-made. Light relief, I’ll go for that on a Tuesday night.

I thought I might trot out of the theatre penning something easy like ‘simple and silly, but an enjoyable romp’ or ‘hardly Shakespeare, but tongue in cheek and made me giggle’, then after banging out twenty minutes’ worth of review, down a glass of red and get an early night. Oh, the wine still flows, but the words do not. Not any nice ones anyway. Sorry.

The man of the hour is Bob, pretending to be all things to all women, in the hope of getting his end away with at least one of the five in his life. They kind of sing, they kind of dance, and Bob ties himself in knots (and paints himself green for the ‘artistic one’ if you’re wondering).

The biggest letdown is the humongous amount of laziness. It’s lazy to have the lyric ‘hip hip hip hip hooray’ just so that it rhymes, lazy to channel David Walliams when cross-dressing, lazy to give women regional accents to distinguish them from each other, lazy to let the audience see them wandering around backstage, lazy to resort to stereotypes just to squeeze a laugh from the different words for ‘lesbian’.

Nervy performances, bad timing and inappropriate demonstrations of lungpower could have been launch night bugs, but the really bad things, the nonsensical jokes, terrible sound effects and awful lyrics must have been intentional, but fell wide of the mark.

Is it unfair to compare this production to SATC?