When £152,000 goes up in flames in the opening of Spend Spend Spend, the infamous tale of 1961 football pools winner Viv Nicholson, more questions arise than pound notes.
The Royal Exchange’s gaudy revival of this 1998 musical by Steve Brown and Justin Greene leaves some, like its subject, feeling emotionally spent and wondering how someone could burn through today’s equivalent of £4 million in under five years. Director Josh Seymour’s symbolic staging suggests some answers, but the show ultimately spends more time on spectacle than insight.
A Fever Dream of Fortune
Narrated in retrospect by the older Viv (Rachel Leskovac), the musical watches her younger self (Rose Galbraith) scurry across a stage of silver coins on cash-green carpet, under tinsel fringes hanging like forever-falling confetti. The shimmering surrealism of Grace Smart’s set reinforces Viv’s detachment from reality, her “dream girl” delusions of sex as “a beautiful dance of love” rather than the “friggin'” others see.
Seymour leans into the unreal, Lucy Hind’s choreography parading strings of dancers through Charlestons and foxtrots, Galbraith riding a giant champagne bottle like a rocket. It’s an appropriately flashy fever dream, but one that starts to feel shallow as Viv’s whirlwind of husbands and spending sprees ticks along.
Scant Emotional Inquiry
For all its glitz, Spend Spend Spend spends too little time interrogating the internal drives behind Viv’s self-destructive spiral. Depictions of her abusive father (Joe Alessi) and violent husbands are handled clumsily, with freeze-frame tableaus of raised fists.
The hardships fueling her fantasies of escape are confined to a lone song, “John Collier,” the men’s voices resonating like the heavy machinery of their mining community. But the psyche of a woman impregnated at 16, married at 17, and destined for four more ill-fated unions gets scant exploration.
Leskovac’s Viv provides glimpses of the emptiness behind the impulsivity, sighing “Roll back the years” and howling “Who’s Gonna Love Me” alone in a harsh spotlight, as if in an empty vault.
– Matt Barton, The Observer
But the musical’s relentless motion eclipses most moments of ruefulness or reflection. By the conclusion, it can offer little insight beyond well-worn platitudes about money not buying happiness.
Ultimately Unsatisfying
Like Viv’s winnings, Spend Spend Spend makes a vivid first impression but doesn’t fully satisfy. Its symbolic staging intriguingly physicalizes Viv’s delusions but only skims the psychology behind her compulsions.
Without a more penetrating look at the personal and societal forces driving Viv’s ruinous financial and romantic decisions, the musical remains a gaudy but somewhat empty fable. While aiming to be a splashy, thought-provoking vehicle, Spend Spend Spend ultimately leaves us, like its heroine, feeling a bit shortchanged.
