Review: Willy's Candy Spectacular (Edinburgh Pleasance King Dome)

Review by Kell Cowley

⭐️⭐️

When it comes to finding a hook for your new hit musical parody at the Edinburgh Fringe, inspiration is often mined from two very reliable sources – popular movies and viral news stories. This year’s festival alone has seen the debut of not one but two new shows riffing off the Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial. But even more current, ever more ridiculous and most fittingly Scottish was February’s story of Willy’s Chocolate Experience. A family day out promoted through an AI-generated website that promised to be an immersive paradise inspired by Roald Dahl’s timeless tale. In reality, attendees found their £35 golden tickets only gained them entrance to a barren grey warehouse, sparsely decorated with a few sad bits of scenery and curtained walkways. They were greeted by a small group of actors in cheap costumes armed only with a script of Chat GPT gibberish and very limited sweet rations.

The original scam had been aiming to cash in on the recently released movie musical Wonka starring Timothée Chalamet. In parodying the event, Willy’s Candy Spectacular has its own movie tie-in with the presence of the original Veruca Salt from the Gene Wilder film (who will be switched out with the original Mike Teevee later in the run). Julie Dawn Cole serves as the show’s glib narrator and takes the opportunity to get her own bit of self-promotion out of her casting, as she pauses the show to plug her autobiography I Want It Now. But Cole is not even the most audacious bit of novelty casting on display here. In the publicity leading up to its Edinburgh run, much more has been made of the inclusion of Kirsty Paterson, AKA, the sad Oompa Loompa from the memes.

Willy’s Candy Spectacular could have been (and probably should have been) Paterson’s story – a rags to riches tale of a jobbing actor going from a humiliating rock-bottom gig to finding sudden fame and an unexpected new world of opportunities. And whilst Paterson has rightly capitalised on that one unfortunate photo, in this production she spends most of her time at the edge of the stage, still the sad girl in a green wig. Three seasoned musical theatre performers take it in turns to play the role of Kirsty Patterson, singing all her big solos. The real Kirsty is reduced to pouting and protesting to Cole's narrator over why she has no part to play in her own story. It's a valid question as Paterson throws herself into this nonsensical show with gusto and is the only one who can bring authenticity to the role of well…herself. Starting with the fact that she is the only actual Glaswegian present. Despite being dubbed as ‘the fiasco in Glasgow’, the rest of the cast consists of US and Canadian actors, none of whom even attempt a Scottish accent, working with a script that is clearly written for an American vernacular. I kept waiting for this discrepancy to be lamp-shaded with some gag about US remakes of popular British IP, but instead it just goes bizarrely unacknowledged, even as an obvious source of satire.

The show’s humour (or lack thereof) is a big problem. Much of the time, the script is not even trying to make jokes, rather just stating the facts of a funny situation and hoping that’ll be enough to raise a laugh. Titbits such as “the kids were only given two jellybeans!” and “the set looked like a meth lab!” are repeated many times over. There aren't many original humorous takes to be found, only those that have been lazily regurgitated from social media commentaries. At best, there is a tone of pantomime humour to the affair, and I can’t help thinking this show might have been better off in an early morning slot, pitched to a family audience. But with the amount of F bombs being hollered at the climax of songs, it is not a suitable musical to bring the kids to (much like the event that inspired it).

Willy’s Candy Spectacular also suffers from having a lack of story or protagonist. The focus  strays from Kirsty Paterson to the original character of Charlize (Monica Evans), a naïve young girl who comes to Willy’s Candy Spectacular and inexplicably declares that she had a great day, defending the AI who created it. Also in contention for actual main character is Willy himself, played by Eric Peterson, who easily commands the most attention with his bombastic vocals and scenery-chewing performance, played sympathetically as a struggling children's entertainer who must now embrace his new status as a spectacular failure. At one point the show briefly introduces The Unknown and despite declaring them to be the greatest character of all time, only has them on stage for a single scene (having them do their jerky creepy movement thing besides a dress mirror). Instead, this show has its own inexplicable antagonist in the form of a chirpy anthropomorphized AI (Nicole Greenwood).  

With no focal character to root for or invest in, it becomes a show built purely on novelty, not narrative. One of these novelties is a six-part Smell-O-Rama ticket, which the audience are instructed to scratch and sniff at random intervals. None of the smells serve a storytelling purpose and they all smell pretty much the same. And this theme of only one flavour continues into the songs themselves. There were five songwriters for this show (all of them accomplished and some of them Emmy winners), but most of whom seemed to have been working in isolation, contributing two or three numbers each. This could have led to a mishmash of song styles, but instead every writer has gone vaguely with the same bubble-gum pop combined with big rousing showtune vibe. The lyrics may not be AI generated, but you sense the heavy use of rhyming dictionaries.

Consequently, Willy’s Candy Spectacular becomes a musical with little sense of identity. It smells of something that has been commissioned, rather than created. There are further novelties to be discovered in its promotional material – astoundingly you will find John Stamos performing its opening number in a music video. In the Edinburgh show, the same song is performed by Wilkie Ferguson III whose powerhouse vocals do make the show genuinely spectacular any time they are showcased. There is no lack of talent in the group of professionals involved in this parody both on and off stage with director Andy Fickman (of both the Broadway and West End Heathers musical) offering the show’s prologue. The show boasts high production values and impressive tech, including one of the best sound systems I have heard all Fringe (for actors who are such strong singers they could have projected perfectly well without it) but ultimately, it is not so much a problem of too many cooks, but rather too much rubbish going into the recipe.   

Maybe the issue is that this show has been created for the wrong reasons? In the moment when the police respond to a call from angry parents, they calmly state that this horrifyingly poor Candy Spectacular is simply “a disappointing transaction”. As such there's nowhere to find any real stakes and, when the novelty has worn off, no real reason to care. When trying to vaguely offer a moral to the story, Cole’s narrator quips that the watching audience have all paid money to watch a rip off Wonka experience based on another rip-off Wonka experience. With Willy’s Candy Spectacular enjoying sold out audiences at the Fringe, maybe this show can be called a successful cash in born out of a failed scam? For all its issues, it won’t be forced to offer refunds, and nobody has called the police on it. Yet.   

Willy’s Candy Spectacular plays at Edinburgh Pleasance King Dome until 18th August. Tickets from willyscandyspectacular.com

Photos by David Monteith-Hodge