Review – Naked Boys Singing!, King’s Head Theatre

Six young actors and dancers successfully audition for a part in a nude review. It’s A Chorus Line with knobs on.

The Whingers have always maintained that the penis mightier than the sword so Phil felt a dipstick when he realised he had left his trusty tool at home and was forced to resort to alternative equipment. Instead his stubby, fat fingers clasped his pencil to doodle through Naked Boys Singing! (conceived by Mister Robert Schrock) on Tuesday evening (staged, appropriately enough, at that dingy joint the King’s Head Theatre).

“Why did we book for this thingamabob ?” nagged Phil’s little friend Andrew shortly before it went up. This sticky question was on his lips again as the pair shot off immediately the limp, unsatisfying affair had come to its ostensible climax. Even at a mere 70 minutes it had taken the Whingers quite some perseverance not to be early risers from their seats and somehow soldiered on to stick the thing out to the end.

NBS is a collection of songs about sex, nudity and masturbation and very tiresome it is too. The humour is in the blue vein. Andrew could rapidly feel one of his heads coming on, Phil had a cob on and was idly dreaming of getting home to play his 7″ Elvis collection.

Well at least two members of the audience were loving it anyway. A man would whistle and howl with laughter while his chum, another schmuck shouted out desperately unfunny comments much to the bemusement of the rest of the audience. Most looked like they wanted the plonker to zip it.

One chap kept his clothes on, cranked up the show a tad as he tackled the best song of the evening (which isn’t praise by any means) about Bob Mitchum as he tinkles on his instrument (sadly a piano, not an organ). But it wasn’t enough to alter the demeanour of the Whingers: for them this flaccid evening had no meat or muscle. Its metaphorical musings on nudity (“naked is more than being uncovered”, “I was naked, I was raw, I was vulnerable”, “nakedness is just another window to the soul”) failed to arouse the Whingers at all. Given the chance they would have jacked it in and beaten a hasty retreat.

The best we can say is that final revelation of the cast members’ members made the Whingers feel better about their limitations and it was suddenly apparent why a myopic person keen on smut might be forced to pay to secure one of the higher-priced front row seats and it might explain why most of those who had bothered to do this came under the heading of “old fellas”.

But, yes, we’re feeling much better about ourselves. Highly liberated. Look out for the follow up: Naked Whingers Drinking at a drinking establishment near you very soon. If you’re on your way to the bar, ours are big ones.

Footnotes

The Whingers were bored stiff by Altar Boyz, which is currently playing in New York at the same theatre complex as NBS and is also soon to be inflicted on London audiences. Same sort of package (but without the todgers) same sort of reaction from these codgers. It got on our wicks and we were cock-a-hoop when it ended.

There’s a film based on NBS. The Whingers thought long and hard on how that could have happened.

The Whingers are indebted to Woody’s World of Penis Euphemisms for help with this piece.