Spice Girls Plot Broadway Blitz

There are good things and then there are execrable things. Good thing: The Spice Girls staging a lucrative reunion nearly a decade after one of them splintered off to ghost-write a crappy memoir and record a little-seen TV spot or two about the horrors of breast cancer. Execrable thing: The Spice Girls mulling a second, Posh-less reunion only a year-and-a-half after prematurely aborting the first. And then you have things that fall squarely in between good and execrable, such as the idea of a Spice Girls musical, which looks poised to bow on London's West End.

It’s part-pleasant and part-shitty. And if it rakes in the quid, the show will probably be produced for Broadway too. And whether pop makes you ache or makes otherwise unrelatable songs relatable, you have to admit that this will probably all go down in flames.

But why the bleak outlook, you ask. Because Ginger Spice, better known as the breast-cancery one, is helming the entire project. For an example of other Spice Girls assignments she was tasked with, please (don’t) see their 2007 comeback single. As project manager for that comeback single, Ginger Spice/Geri Halliwell was in charge of writing the ballad. Other requirements: she also sorted through all the e-mail attachments, such as “scaryspice_ooh.wav” and “scaryspice_ahh.wav” and pasted them onto a demo. Additionally, she was also in charge of autotuning Victoria Beckham’s vocals. So to leave the production values of a stage spectacle starring five unknowns (shouldn’t it be six, technically?) to Halliwell is a dubious if lofty responsibility.

Luckily for Halliwell and the rest of the crew, apart from her oohs and ahhs, Scary Spice does have experience as a seat filler.

But in the off chance that Halliwell doesn’t mismanage the project into a pile of beetle dung, this also puts the quintet on the precipice of a cunning self-sustaining business model. Such an enterprise would require minimal involvement from the girls themselves (which assures no last-minute cancellations), but would pay out big for their life rights. Especially if Spice World: The Musical goes onto age like Cats.