Review: Fun at the Beach Romp-Bomp-a-Lomp!! at Southwark Playhouse Borough

Looking at the weather forecast this week, it feels like the only chance some of us will get to go to the beach this summer is to visit Southwark Playhouse, where Brandon Lambert and Martin Landry’s Fun at the Beach Romp Bomp A Lomp!! is currently playing. 

Directed by Mark Bell, this is essentially a very overt pastiche of the jukebox musical. Harking back to those ‘gee whiz’ 1950’s set musicals – think Grease – when the latest dance craze gripped the high-school social rather than TikTok. 

Just like the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds, our protagonists are spending a day on the sand competing in the Beach Romp Bomp A Lomp to be crowned King or Queen of the beach. But they’ll need to complete a series of challenges first, and before long we realise this is going to be a bloody battle rather than an emotional one. 

The script is bonkers. Extra-marital affairs with a mermaid, ghosts wielding killer limbo poles and an omnipotent being controlling events, are some of the more believable plot points. It’s all ridiculous. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s so bad, it’s bloody brilliant, but it’s nearly always very funny.

Nearly. There are bits that don’t work so well; the bird noises from two of the characters quickly becomes annoying, and some bits drag on too long, including a skit lifted directly from The Play That Goes Wrong, which Mark Bell also directed. 

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There’s also an issue with the pacing, it starts off pretty slow and much of the first hour is dedicated to setting everything up. The more exciting bit, where the Romp Bomp A Lomp turns all Squid Games on us, feels rushed and underdeveloped. 

What keeps the audience engaged is the music. Now, we’re supposed to be taking the mickey out of jukebox musicals, and how random hits are just shoehorned into a narrative. But Fun at the Beach… doesn’t actually use any hit songs per se. It’s possibly a licensing thing, and so instead they have their own songs which will sound familiar. 

‘Mature Women Don’t Whine’ sounds suspiciously like a Four Seasons number, and Kylie may have scored even more sales with ‘The Ocean Motion’ rather than the Locomotion. 

This actually works even better than having the original songs. You can still bop along, but the lyrics are changed for even greater hilarity. This is most evident in ‘It’s In His Peck’ a hilarious take on The Shoop Shoop Song. It all sounds great thanks to a brilliant band led by Brandon Lambert.

The other big selling point is how strong the cast is, all eight of them are vocally superb, Damien James and Katie Oxman as Dickie and Chickie in particular.  They throw themselves whole heartedly into it all and their enthusiasm becomes infectious.  Ellie Clayton and Tom Babbage have the best comedic moments as Joe and Mary Joe, while Janice Landry as Chastity and Jack Whittle as Dude have the vacuous but deep high school cool kids down to a tee.

There’s also gentle mocking of the (usually large) ensemble in a jukebox musical, here the entire ensemble is played by Bradley Adams and Dixie Newman, and everything felt brighter when they appeared on Emily Bestow’s painted sand dunes.

Fun at the Beach Romp Bomp A Lomp!! Is not your typical night at the theatre, it’s weird and wacky, and sometimes wonderful too.  With some judicious re-writes and a little trimming, this could be the kind of musical that would thrive at the Edinburgh Fringe. Still, for all its silliness, I had fun, and you probably will too.