Jamba Juice: The Musical

What I liked

The lead actress playing the character, Daria, had a great singing voice and stage presence. She struck me as someone who would give a great performance given the material.

What I didn't like

I understand the time constraints of a full story in 45 minutes, but I feel like both the script and the music needs serious retooling. Certain scenes felt almost improvised, specifically ones between the main character Trevor and his friend/fellow employee. How many times can one person come onstage at the top of a scene and ask if the other character is going to sweep? If you were at Jamba Juice the Musical, you’d learn that the answer to that question is: too many times. There was just honestly not enough information given to the audience to make me feel for any of these characters. The Jamba manager was made out to be a villain simply for doing her job, while other characters seemed reduced to broadstroke stereotypes that did nothing to further the plot or any kind of social commentary, but frequently came in and out of scenes with no real purpose other than tweaking out over Jamba or needing to use a bathroom.
The music was both not very memorable and yet much of it recalled other works, for example, did anyone catch “anything’s possible” from Seussical or was that just me? At one point a song started and I thought I was suddenly watching a performance of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid. If this was intentional, ok… but I’m not sure where nostalgia or a mixed bag of genres really plays into the setting of Jamba Juice. A song about President Obama, while being something that I’m sure many young people can relate to loving Obama, it felt cringey, and again served no point in furthering the plot, other than allowing us to know that Trevor loves to go off on singing tangents about his love for Obama and then it’s never addressed or mentioned again. What’s the point?
Overall, it was a strange experience. The show in its current state, to me, feels unrehearsed and unfinished. Maybe with additional character work and tightening of the songs, it could live up to what I expected it to be based upon the reviews.

My overall impression

This being the first Fringe show I’ve attended, I decided to check reviews beforehand. I’m not sure if I caught an off night, but this performance did not live up to what many of the reviews made me feel like would be a rip roaring good time. Maybe the humor wasn’t for me, but I didn’t find the show to be particularly funny, much of it felt forced, as if I could feel the buildup of every joke coming and while most of the audience was laughing, I just simply was not. It felt like a dress rehearsal and not a ticketed performance. The songs were average at best, the cast didn’t seem to be very in sync with one another or that particularly engaged with the material.