(seen at the afternoon performance on 30th August 2025)
Charity “British Youth Music Theatre" aim to empower young people aged 11 to 21 to reach their creative potential. This residency at Southwark Playhouse demonstrates just how well they are achieving it.
Eden Tredwell’s show is Norse mythology meets Broadway musical comedy... and the collision is often hilarious.
Loki, God of Mischief (Patrick Gill) and brother Thor (Millie Whale) need rejuvenating apples to keep them young after all these millennia. Managing to annoy Idun (Rebecca Edwards - lovely delivery), keeper of the precious fruit, Loki has to find another way to source the goods that keep them young.
He ends up on Earth, at a mortal beauty business whose owner mysteriously acquired some really effective apple-juice one day. The rest is a mixture of properly clever plotting with twists you won’t see coming, combined with excellent direction and well-considered choreography.
Cory Shipp has little space to play with for set and tight budgets for so many costumes, but is ingenious in using screens and a few tables to set the scene. Equally, her God outfits and small props are a triumph.
Director Grace Taylor and choreographer Steven Dean Moore build on this with truly outstanding inventiveness. Taylor’s experience at “Six” clearly shows in some of the ensemble work, her bright solutions in a small space never fail, with a perfect "transformation" scene and some fine magic tricks woven in.
Moore comes up with dance routines the youngest in the company execute easily and which also stretch the senior members. Tight ensemble moments, solos to cover scene changes, and pleasingly sassy exit moments - it all works.
With book, music and lyrics by a single person, Tredwell is in full control of her material. Really witty lines and a standout number “Through Her Eyes” keep the show moving at a pace zingier than Thor’s hammer-on-a-string (you had to be there, front row, to see monkey and the person next to it flinching).
The young cast are assured. Gill grows in confidence as a leading man with each scene, energetic with charisma to match.
Whale takes rightly her chances to shine, a song for her hammer improved by some expert timing.
Ariana Callan as Ingrid, the HR person dreaming of being a photographer has natural stage presence, a gift for comedy and a voice which (worryingly strained-sounding in her first number) needs looking after for the future use it will need.
In smaller roles, Huginn (Arthur Owen) and Muninn (Layla Amaning) steal the show as a pair of ravens who deserve their own spin-off as a double-act.
With so many in the cast it is hard to single out more, but mentions of Jayden Kaye as dodgy French photographer Jean Pierre John Paul, Roby Hawes as Odin, Charlie Holmes as Frida and Molly Stainthorpe as Female Loki do not go amiss.
With a company this good, the only flaw is that there is still work to do on this premiering script. It jumps disconcertingly a couple of times – noticeably the “contest” and “resolution” sequences. It is worth remembering, however, that “Operation Mincemeat” was also polished at Southwark Playhouse, and this really is in almost as fine shape on first outing.
So much potential, a show that gives the Greeks over at “Hadestown” a run for their money in the mythology stakes... and a young cast that should be making them nervous for future work too in many cases.
Sadly only two London performances remain at time of writing, but this is a musical and theatre company worth watching now and in the future.
4 stars.
Photo credit: Leanne Dixon. Used by kind permission of the British Youth Music Theatre press office.