Get Real: The Return! Brighton Fringe

So here we are, the great month-long monster of the festival and fringe has stirred again, and there is something genuinely infectious about a room full of people willing each other to succeed. That spirit ran through every minute of Out Cast's latest Brighton Fringe outing, Get Real: The Return!, a meta comedy musical about a cheesy 90s pop group attempting a comeback, and the complications, emotional, professional, and frankly chaotic, that reunions stir up.

Out Cast, the Brighton-based LGBTQ+ company founded by Elliot Toms specifically to give people who might otherwise never set foot on a stage the chance to try, are back with their third production. The premise is deliciously ripe: Chaz, the group's lead singer, is determined to get the old band back together, a quest that takes him from a run-down holiday camp gigging with the gritty KK to a TV talent show, with a long-buried scandal threatening to derail everything before it starts.

The performer playing Chaz strikes exactly the right note; desperately deluded, stars permanently in his eyes, yet with a genuine warmth and love of music that keeps you rooting for him through the mania. Gav brings immediate gusto to proceedings, engaging the audience from the opening and rarely letting go. My fav was Petra, pop recluse and reluctant returnee, lost in her posh mansion conjuring what can only be described as electronic milk music. Throaty, wafting, and magnificently out of touch, she lands somewhere between Fenella Fielding and Maggi Hambling, and is one of the funniest presences on stage. A softball millionaire sports sketch is among the sharper comic ideas, landing with cheeky absurdity.

The 90s pop pastiche is handled with affectionate cheekiness. The audience visibly loved Reach, and a strong ensemble performance of This Is Me drew real warmth. Julia's show-stopping Shirley Bassey number was a moment of full-throated theatrical pleasure that gave the audience genuine thrills. Musical director Simon Gray on piano keeps the energy high throughout, keeping the whole thing bobbing along with easy assurance. The rousing finale with the full cast on stage sent the audience out on a proper high.

The staging is minimal, leaning on AI projections that, to be fair raise a few laughs of their own. Where the show earns its emotional weight is in how it treats the scandal at the group's heart of Petris' tabloid exposure , the hurt, the fall-out, the fractured relationships, with enough tenderness that the reconciliation at the end feels earned rather than convenient. This is, as all good musicals understand, what the form is for.

Some of the more complex choreography stretched a few cast members, but this is the fringe, and frankly that's part of the deal. What carries the show is ensemble chemistry and a collective willingness to commit. The audience laughed often, with specific moments drawing the kind of reactions that tell you something has genuinely landed. The spirit of people taking a leap, supported by each other, celebrated by the room, is the whole point of a company like Out Cast, and it is very much present here.

Until Sat 2nd May, St Marys Church Hall, more info or book tickets.