There were high hopes for Hello Kitty Must Die. Backed by a big American producer – the team that produced Six on Broadway, among other shows – and based on a cult novel, a purr of excitement accompanied the musical before its opening in Edinburgh. Now here we are with a dead cat on the table.
The tragedy of Hello Kitty Must Die is that it’s not a particularly bad show. It’s just a very bad musical. The novel by Angela S Choi (now Kate Kamen) follows a Chinese-American woman who rejects the cutesy Hello Kitty stereotype by engaging in murderous acts of revenge. Gail Rastorfer and Kurt Johns have turned it into a sort-of play, while Cecilia Lin and Jessica Wu have added sort-of songs.
We plod along for a while as 30-year-old Fiona chunters through the story of her life, trying to take her virginity with a dildo she’s nicknamed Mr Happy, falling in love with an old school friend turned murderous plastic surgeon, trying her hand at a dash of slaughter herself.
Four performers play the other characters in her life: conservative dad trying to marry her off, lecherous boss overworking her at the law firm where she’s employed. It’s all fine, often funny, and occasionally gets its claws out as it satirises reductive Asian stereotypes.
Then, suddenly, the PA crackles into life and the cast are dancing and singing. But these pumping rock numbers appear in such odd places in the narrative, and none is given room to take root. Just when a song sounds like it might be getting catchy, it stops abruptly and the narrative continues.
In fact nothing is given room. The novel’s story has been hacked and reduced to the point that it’s completely unclear why Fiona and her old school friend are murdering people, or why she even likes the friend in the first place.
The five cast members do the best they can with the swerving material. There’s real bite and snarl to Sami Ma’s Fiona especially, and Lennox T Duong and Ann Hu clearly relish overdoing the vile men in Fiona’s life. Johns, who also directs, brings a sense of forward motion which, in small parts, makes for a gripping story.
Then the grip loosens and we’re left with material which, by trying to be too much – play, rock musical, condensed novel – ends up not being much of anything.
Let’s not kill off Hello Kitty Must Die quite yet. A resurrection is possible, and presumably this is just the first iteration of a show that’s crying out for a longer, more extensively workshopped version. But in its current confused state, it’s one for the litter tray.
