Review: FUCCBOIS: LIVE IN CONCERT, Soho Theatre

Grab a hankie, wipe away the tears and round up all your friends-with-benefits: after 12 years, pop sensations Fuccbois have called it a day and we are all invited to their final gig. 

Playing to a notional crowd of 90,000 (or as many can safely fit into Soho’s cabaret basement space), the four-piece boyband are here for one last goodbye. Their loyal fans await the anthems they know and love about midnight booty calls, one night stands and the ideal way to ghost someone. Folded in are heartfelt messages to any “females” in the audience: “women are just people, even the ones who aren’t 10s”.

What could have been some straightforward spoofery of Take That, Boyzone, Westlife and other two-syllable all-male chart-toppers is given a tweak or two. The most obvious is in the casting with the staunchly heterosexual Brendan, Brandon, Also Brendan and Tyler performed by writer and composer Bridie Connell, Vidya Makan, Clara Harrison and Megan Walshe respectively. They play these heartbreakers for all their worth, carrying off impressive beards and throwing chunky moves while satirising toxic masculinity, the poisoned chalice that is modern dating and all the standard boyband tropes. At the same time, these amiable idiots are working out their “creative differences” as Blazey Best’s stage manager Micaela tries (and fails) to keep the show together.

Connell’s music is the highlight here. Like those for the criminally underrated film Walk Hard, the carefully crafted lyrics and the ear-grabbing melodies form a songlist of far higher quality and variety than might be expected from the jokey premise. The obligatory self-titled stadium filler (“Fuccbois” is not a million miles from “Wham Rap”, truth be told) gets a rowdy cheer. More hits follow: a soulful paean to ghosting called “Slow Fade”, a jaunty Irish shanty number celebrating the joys of gaslighting (or does it?) and the slow wind that is “Three Little Words” and its tips on the perfect bootycall.  

There’s a political edge too. Performative male allyship is ridiculed in “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” (witgh a chorus featuring lines like “Give us a smile” and “Can we have sex now?”) A “special Australian guest star” joins the boys for “I Hear You Girl” and ends up being the butt of their arrogant behaviour. The bellylaughs are all present and correct but the points made — valid as they are — feel weak, obvious and understated. 

Director Richard Carroll imbibes the affair with a jaunty vibe flowing throughout, the connection always lively between stage and audience. This is a production that could work just as well in Clapham's The Two Brewers as in Soho Theatre’s main space with the frequent forays out into the audience and the use of video screens enhancing the singalong atmosphere. Listen carefully and there are faint thematic echoes of shows from over a decade ago when London vaudeville legend Victoria Falconer (his co-artistic director at Hayes Theatre Co) and her erstwhile EastEnd Cabaret partner Bernie Dieter played this same stage.

This wasn’t the only drag kings-as-boyband parody at the Fringe this year: MAN!FEST: The Drag Boyband Musical was also there suggesting that what some may have seen as a gimmick may have now become a genre. Coincidence or not, it is always welcome to see shows of this calibre from a corner of the drag universe almost entirely ignored by RuPaul’s global media juggernaut.

Photo credit: Cameron Grant