SPEND AN EVENING WITH A SELF-PITYING SADSACK

It might just work, if the love interest, in the style of an Elizabethan play, is a boy dressed as a girl; or perhaps a Pantomimic girl playing the part of Prince Charming, but otherwise... what would be the attraction of a musical based on the life and songs of Robbie Williams?

After all, Robbie is surely not keen to get involved with musical theatre, not with his strictly heterosexual lifestyle, you'd have thought.

Contact Music is quite keen:

The former boyband star is convinced the show will be a hit and emulate the success of similar musicals about ABBA, QUEEN and ROD STEWART.

Hmm... well, while Abba and Queen have done well, Stewart's Tonight The Night barely made it to its anniversary before the large number of unsold seats made it feel less Tonight's the Night as That's Yer Lot, if we remember rightly. And the Madness one put most of its backers on permanent suicide watch. And that one had better tunes to work with than Williams does.

A source tells British newspaper the Daily Star, "A musical based on Robbie's colourful career would be dynamite. It's got all the elements of a classic.

Well, all the elements, except for a hero who people could warm to. And since Williams is at his most popular when his songs are at their most dirgey, it's going to be hard to stitch together a story that doesn't feel like you're plodding through treacle. Basing it on the life of Mr. Pie won't help, either:

"There's fame, fortune, heartbreak, breakdowns, exile and salvation. You couldn't make it up."

Well, you could, actually. People do, all the time. They're called novelists, young Robbie, and they write books. We're not entirely sure where the salvation comes from in the Williams story - an increasingly self-parodic character reduced to pretending to want to hump every woman he's introduced to because he's paranoid everyone thinks he's gay, rebuffed by the largest market in the world on several occasions, tied into a contract which makes him little more than EMI's puppy and reliant on songwriters to keep him supplied with material - we're a little lost as to the salvatory element there. Unless the big ending is "well, he did sell more Knebworth tickets than Oasis, which makes him the most popular act that nobody really likes..."

We'll not even start on why half-assed tourist-mops like this sort of thing are killing London theatre while making it seem like it's vibrant, shall we?

music robbie williams abba london rod stewart