Oh gawd. ‘Exposure the Musical’ is the sort of unwise folly that proves what a random, nasty place the universe is by being unrelenting dreadful, in spite of the long struggle against adversity that’s led to its creation.
Actually, scratch that: the fact it took 12 years for writer Mike Dyer to get ‘Exposure’ made – battling through funding difficulties, aborted productions and a near-fatal motorbike crash – is perhaps a sign that a fundamentally benevolent universe was in fact trying to stop him.
The bland title in no way prepares you for the bizarre storyline. At first ‘Exposure’ appears to be about an unnamed, award-winning photojournalist (Kurt Kansley), but he gets bumped off after two songs, bitten by a poisonous snake as apparent retribution for photographing an African tribesman. This prompts a duet between the dying man and his buff, topless unborn son Jimmy (David Albury, who’ll surely be removing this one from his CV as soon as is feasibly possible), and, er, well things don’t ever make any more sense. Jimmy grows up into a noble snapper in his dad’s mould. But after he comes back from Sudan to take photos of his pop star ex-schoolfriend Pandora (Niamh Perry), he attracts the attention of her apparently satanic manager Miles (Michael Greco) who sets him a sort of paparazzi-style photo assignment, possibly in exchange for his soul. But can the appropriately confused Jimmy be redeemed by Tara (Natalie Anderson), a sexy, intellectual homeless woman he meets flogging shit angels made out of coke cans?
It’s actually worse than that sounds, its already nonsensical plot dissolving into gibbering incoherence in its excruciating final third. Director Phil Willmott keeps things bright and energetic, but he imposes no sense of order on Dyer’s mess, which drunkenly lurches between jaw-droppingly crass melodrama and grating pomposity without a glimmer of guiding intelligence. The melodic, rocky songs are about as close to a saving grace as ‘Exposure’ gets, but they often have hilariously little bearing on the story.
It’s a proper, old-fashioned howler, and does have a certain so-inept-it’s-quite-funny charm. But it’s hard to really derive any schadenfreude from ‘Exposure’s awfulness: it’s evidently a labour of love, and should probably be forgotten rather than mocked.