BOY BAND
The Glitch
★★★
“Kunze and Shipman manage to get us on side by their sheer love of being up there”
In these grim times, sometimes you want a show that simply refuses to take itself seriously. Boy Band is the romping, refreshing, silly night out you didn’t know you needed.
Created by Michael Kunze, Hugh Edwards and Fergus Shipman, and performed at The Glitch by Kunze and Shipman, Boy Band roughly traces the creation of – you guessed it – a boy band in one of the member’s childhood basements. Built mostly around original songs packed with laugh-out-loud pun-filled lyrics. The show delights in squeezing every last drop out of the boy band trope, even staging a thinly veiled and extremely short-lived band break up as a marketing ploy.
The songs are deliberately terrible and catchy in equal measure, ranging from a lament about an affair with a love bot to a suggestive number about chips and nacho cheese featuring some disturbingly wacky choreography that may have permanently ruined nachos for me.
The set is a simple circle of mismatched battery-powered candles arranged in a circle on the floor– an endearingly incongruous choice that somehow adds to the impression that we are not watching a show but instead watching a couple of dope smoking friends winging it in their basement – which of course was the entire point.
Michael Kunze plays self-proclaimed “bad boy” Jools Jacuzzi with a goofy abandon that is inexplicably charismatic. Fergus Shipman is Ray Jay Jay Jay, Jacuzzi’s quieter, cooler understated self-conscious counterpart, who at one point seems to be on the verge of opening up about a body image crisis and ends up singing a song about ice cream. Early on, the two address the elephant in the room (“Hello Elephant”) by saying that their third member, Hugh Way (played by Hugh Edwards), wasn’t there. It does feel a little incomplete – leaving me speculating about what a third band member would have brought to the on-stage dynamic. They miss an opportunity to make it into a real band break up, but Kunze and Shipman are to be commended by how they step up, making me think for a while that maybe, despite the poster evidence, the third cast member had never actually been there at all.
If the characters had been a little more developed, their relationship between each other more intentional, and the story arc of the band more finely drawn, Boy Band could have been a triumph – not only making us laugh but also making us care about these full-grown would-be boys.
Nevertheless, Kunze and Shipman manage to get us on side by their sheer love of being up there. At one point they asked a brave audience member up on stage. After serenading them with an improvised song, they asked, “What advice would you give your younger self?” The answer: “Have more fun.” Kunze looked genuinely moved for a second, as if he couldn’t have scripted it better himself. Touching his heart he said, “Wow, wow, that is the whole point of this show, man…” And if that was indeed the point of the show, Boy Band pulled it off with flying colours.
BOY BAND
The Glitch
Reviewed on 11th October 2025
by Samantha Karr
Photography by Lilla Hodossy
Previously reviewed at this venue:
NEVER GET TO HEAVEN IN AN EMPTY SHELL | ★★★ | July 2025
THE RISE AND FALL OF VINNIE & PAUL | ★★★★ | April 2025
