Review: Willy's Candy Spectacular

Back in February, the world went ‘huh… haha’ while looking at funny videos on social media of a Willy Wonka 'experience' gone wrong in Glasgow, before the next viral trend in our attention economy came along. Maybe I’m just more curmudgeonly than I care to admit, but do we really need a 70 minute musical based on this? It seems unimaginative and Willy's Candy Spectacular is as lazy and basic as its source material.

It is a big show in the sense that it has cast some semi-big Hollywood-ish names for a Fringe show, including Julie Dawn-Cole, Veruca Salt from the original Willy Wonka film and The Big Bang Theory actress Riki Lindholme. Dawn-Cole serves as the highlight, along with Kirsty Paterson (of the disgruntled Oompa Loompa meme fame from the fiasco in Glasgow) as the narrators of the musical. Despite these creative talents, it's more of a table read than anything and perhaps greater staging would have created a more intelligible show. What's more, even the star names can’t save the rest of the cast from the non-existent story and derivative, samey songs written by the six (six!) songwriters. 

There are songs about ChatGPT (I’m looking forward to people not talking about AI anymore) and 'the Unknown' – perhaps the biggest meme of the whole shebang in February. The song is a low point of Willy's Candy Spectacular: under-rehearsed with the harmonies way off. It is a good symbol of the whole; a botched show about out-of-date memes – it really is hard to like.