Here & Now - The Steps Musical

Shaun Kitchener (book), Steps (music), arranged by Matt Spencer-Smith

Steps, Royo, Pete Waterman, Fascination Management

Opera House, Manchester

September 2-13, 2025; 2hrs 30 mins

(also at Newcastle Theatre Royal, October; Sheffield Lyceum, November; Liverpool Empire, November; Stockton Globe, December; Grand Opera House York, February 2026; Blackpool Opera House, April; Hull New Theatre, April; Leeds Grand Theatre, May. Full dates here)

Singing for their jobs: the cast of Here and Now. All pics: Pamela Raith

Last night's press night for Here & Now - The Steps Musical was certainly a star-studded affair. Steps themselves were there as well as several iconic drag queens - and quite thrillingly for a 1980s kid like me, Pete Waterman seemed to be everywhere.

And let’s be honest, Steps had some bloody great songs: some of the classic Stock, Aitken and Waterman hits, and loans from the likes of Abba and the BeeGees. All highly produced and of supreme quality in terms of harmonic interest, dance potential and sheer commercial appeal, not to mention theatrical joy.

There’s a tried and tested jukebox musical formula for taking related popular repertoire and creating a story unrelated to the band, with Mamma Mia perhaps the most artistically successful, and we can certainly see the footprints of that show here. Other influences creep in, like the camp domesticity converted into kitsch glamour of shows like Everybody's Talking About Jamie. The prime setting of the current musical, supermarket Better Best Bargains, gives us the potential for the kind of bonkers 1990s neon campness of Dale’s Supermarket Sweep, for anyone who remembers that TV show.

Camp irony is the name of the game for Here & Now, and the incongruence of the grit and everyday with the make-the-best-of-anything glamour, is kind of inspirational. No wonder the auditorium was full of drag queens (maybe also there to support DragRaceUK contestant River Medway, who plays drag queen Jem, glamorous love interest of checkout boy Robbie (Blake Patrick Anderson).

Here & Now gives us what we loved about Steps - unapologetic, capitalist camp on acid. It appeals to our teenage selves and the performers in all of us. With matching costumes, learnable routines (girls and boys), they were achievable, teen-bedroom happy pop. Maybe in a new era of global news tragedies and public distress, we can all benefit from some happy pop. If it happens in the supermarket then it’s even more accessible.

But here’s the rub: the songs are excellent, ABBA-like in their harmonic interest and emotive storytelling, so they’re just too good to stay in the supermarket throughout. The routines that incorporate trolleys, stock cages, checkouts and various items of comedy stock are done, and done, until they can be done no more. The airport scene for Better Best Forgotten brings us some light relief, for we are treated to a chorus of flight attendants (very Steps) instead of checkout staff, and swirling wheely-suitcases rather than trolleys. But then we’re back where the action starts and ends, in Better Best Bargains. All the pink and blue neon on the shop floor, and the numerous glammed-up variations on a store pinny can’t give us the elevation that we get from an exotic location in Mamma Mia or Greatest Days. In those shows brilliant songs are afforded a fantasy location that we participate in creating; our imagination of those places (however sparsely-staged) is elevated by the magic of the music. Being forever in the supermarket, our musical imaginations have nowhere to go, and so we’re frustrated.

Not only that, but the songs are shoehorned into the story with varying degrees of success. Things keep happening sporadically without much set-up, and so we invest only because of a beautiful song where the cohesion and integrity of the drama are lacking. Tragedy is a BeeGees masterpiece, an epic musical number enhanced with the dance moves of Steps. It feels better than a car park protest with placards about superstore closure.

Other numbers work far better. River Medway and his crew of soapsud dancers on light-up washing machines giving us Chain Reaction is comedy gold.

The stories, if not quite fully formed, are beautiful in their intention. There’s a rainbow spectrum of sexuality in the love stories, and it’s a joy that the tales told on the musical theatre stage have well and truly caught up with the audience. There’s also the love story of the mother, which we’ve seen in Waitress and Jamie and which is consolidated here. It’s time for all these love stories, and the ambition is laudable.

So four stars - mainly for the music, the close harmonies (particularly of the three leads, Rebecca Lock, Jacqui Dubois and Rosie Singha), the costumes, the dancing, the sentiment - why not?

Go and see some very happy pop, and take your chance on a happy ending.

More info and tickets here