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"The Spice Girls musical opened at London&amp;#039;s Piccadilly Theatre with a glitzy opening night yesterday, attended by writer Jennifer Saunders and all five members of the Girl Power pop group. However, Posh, Baby, Scary, Sporty and Ginger probably won&amp;#039;t want to pick up a paper this morning to read the first reviews of their show, because nearly all have been scathing (only a five-line review in The Sun offered any real positives). Digital Spy has rounded up the critics&amp;#039; verdicts on the new West End show.  The Guardian &amp;quot;But the real problem is the songs. For one thing, there aren&amp;#039;t enough memorable hits in a career that lasted for three albums to support two hours of theatre. In fairness, the Spice Girls had a handful of decent songs - &amp;#039;Stop&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;Say You&amp;#039;ll Be There&amp;#039; among them \u00E2\u20AC\u201C but elsewhere they&amp;#039;re forced to rely on pretty vapourous album tracks such as &amp;#039;Right Back At Ya&amp;#039; and, at one panic-inducing moment, delve into the solo oeuvre of Geri Halliwell.&amp;quot; The Telegraph &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll tell you what I wanted, what I really, really wanted \u00E2\u20AC\u201C I wanted this terrible show to stop... this is a fatuous show with nothing fresh to say about popular culture and our fixation with fame. If you love the Spice Girls stay at home and listen to their greatest hits.&amp;quot; Daily Mail &amp;quot;What a disappointment. The Spice Girls were fun, full of beans, a greater force for feminism than Harriet Harman or even Nick Clegg. They were can-do, can-just-about-sing. What they lacked in the harmony department, they made up for with vim, va-voom and hip-clingy Union Jack frocks. So how come this new musical featuring the group&amp;#039;s songs is so drudgy, so sour and focused on failure?&amp;quot;  The Independent &amp;quot;Not only does Jennifer Saunders&amp;#039;s script rarely give you that necessary gleeful sense of expectancy about where the songs are going to be shoe-horned in, but it&amp;#039;s embarrassingly derivative of Mamma Mia! and looks way past its sell-by date in its utterly surprise-free satiric swipe at X Factor.&amp;quot;  Huffington Post &amp;quot;These are songs for dancefloors, not the aircraft hanger space of what amounted to a big-budget school production, without a hairbrush to sing into in sight.&amp;quot; Evening Standard &amp;quot;When &amp;#039;Spice Up Your Life&amp;#039; is performed, it&amp;#039;s a genuinely buzzy moment. But there aren&amp;#039;t enough really potent songs to make this a compelling jukebox musical. The first half is limp, the second better yet hardly electrifying.&amp;quot;  The Mirror &amp;quot;You would think it would be easy to strap the songs of one of the biggest girl groups in recent history to an exuberant story of girl power to create a worldwide money-making machine. But you would be wrong... Viva Forever? More like clapped-out Vauxhall Viva, five careless owners with far too many miles on the clock.&amp;quot; The Sun &amp;quot;As a true fan, I was worried that the jukebox musical formula might not work with their songs but Jennifer Saunders has done a great job with the script and the show flows really well. Now that the hits have been immortalised in this way, I hope that generations of little girls to come will love them as much as I did.&amp;quot; Digital Spy &amp;quot;The Spice Girls were bold, brassy, sexy and spray-painted with colour - but this wasn&amp;#039;t. Perhaps it&amp;#039;s our fault for craving an all-singing, all-disco-dancing throwback to the &amp;#039;90s. We wanted to leave the theatre with our eyeballs collaged in sequins, feeling nauseous due to Baby&amp;#039;s lollipop over-consumption, tattooed in Girl Power and flashing our bras - but we didn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; Spice Girls &amp;#039;Viva Forever&amp;#039; - Launch pictures:  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/showbiz/news/a444667/spice-girls-viva-forever-musical-opens-to-terrible-reviews-round-up/>