Fun and feel-good: Here & Now: The Steps Musical at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

Thanks to Wales Millennium Centre for providing us with review tickets for Here & Now

If anything is going to banish the February blues, it’s Here & Now: The Steps Musical, which is quite possibly the most fun and feel-good thing you’ll see in Cardiff this month.

Featuring the hits of 90s/00s pop band Steps, this juke box musical is completely cheesy and over the top at times – but totally owns it and revels in its own silliness. There’s so much laugh out loud humour, heartwarming friendships and romances, but also moments of emotional depth as the characters deal with loss, grief, abandonment and low self-esteem.

It’s all set in the most vibrant and neon bright supermarket you could imagine, Better Best Bargains, which will have you asking why staff at your local supermarket don’t dance on the checkouts to 5, 6, 7, 8 as they reel off today’s special offers as part of the day’s Half Price Hoe Down.

It is here we meet Caz, whose life falls apart as she approaches her 50th birthday and realises that the summer of love she and her friends dreamed of is more a summer of lies, betrayal and heartbreak as relationships come to an end and their beloved supermarket faces closure.

Laura Denning as Caz really drives the show, she’s warm, likeable and has a tremendous vocal power, equally at home belting out the cheesy pop as she is giving new emotional depth to the ballads, most notably Heartbeat, which she sings about her stillborn son. It’s so great to see a musical centred around a woman of this age, and Caz is no doubt very relatable to many of us older women in the audience tonight whose younger years were soundtracked by the hits of Steps whether we realised it at the time or not.

The relationships between Caz and work colleagues Vel (Jacqui Dubois), Robbie (Dean Rickards) and Neeta (Rosie Singha) are endearing as they dance around trollies and wheelie bins while learning about friendship, forgiveness and, in the words of Better Best Forgotten, to “take a chance on a happy ending”.

My favourite moment of the night has to go to River Medway, star of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, in the role of Jem. River gives the most flamboyant performance of Chain Reaction – the Diana Ross hit Steps covered in 2001 – bursting out of a freezer dressed as a bag of ice. The sleek sliver and blue shiny costumes, the choreography, the sheer ridiculousness of it all… it’s absolute genius and the audience love it.

The eight-minute megamix at the end of the show rounds the night off with everyone up on their feet and dancing and it’s just what we need after two hours of trying our hardest not to sing along. I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard Steps fan but I knew just about every word and even my teenage daughter knew more songs than she thought she would, such is the legacy of their music.

Listening to people leaving the theatre, there’s laughter and singing and it all feels so uplifting. No, it’s not the best musical in the world ever, but it’s fun, feel-good, nostalgic, and a reminder of the power of friendship and finding love in the unlikeliest of places.

Here & Now: The Steps Musical is at Wales Millennium Centre until Saturday 7 February, with performances on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday at 7.30pm, Wednesday and Saturday at 2.30pm and Friday at 4pm and 8pm.

Tickets, priced from £19, are still available, although availability is limited for some performances.

Age guidance is 8+ with no admission to under 2s.  The running time is approximately 2 hours 30, including an interval.

Book online here.

Warnings: May contain strobe lighting and flashing lights. Here & Now includes discussion around baby loss which some may find upsetting.

Here & Now is touring the UK until May, more information here.

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Also coming up at Wales Millennium Centre:

Tina – The Tina Turner Musical, 10-28 February

Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes, 3-7 March

Mean Girls, 10-14 March

Barnum, 17-21 March