Tour review

Expectations aren’t necessarily high for the debut comedy tour of a man who made his name doing backing dancing on TikTok, however many musical A-listers have endorsed him online.

Keep that anticipation muted, and you’ll likely enjoy Christopher Hall’s Girl For All Seasons, given he’s as gregarious, personable and gossipy as you would want from your camp best mate.

But the show – broadly speaking a celebration of female energy – is definitely a triumph of personality over content, with a full evening of froth proving frustratingly less satisfying than his charm promises.

We get to know him in a first half that comprises chattily inconsequential crowd work. ‘Anyone been on holiday?’ he asks like a hairdresser desperate to break the awkward silence. The banter bundles along pleasingly enough, never in much danger of hitting comedy gold but establishing him as energetic, engaging company. 

And when entertaining triple-threat support act Amy Webster hits technical issues, he shows generosity in coming back out to buoy the energy while she fixes it. He’s good at that.

During his chats, and the show proper, Hall sometimes sits on the front of the stage, sometimes lays across the front of it, treating it like a bed during a teenage sleepover. That’s a reflection of his entire vibe, and is especially apt when discussing his school years, feeling more affinity to the girls than the boys and not quite understood by his more traditional parents.

Mining late-Nineties, early-Noughties nostalgia, Hall invites audience members to share their embarrassing first Hotmail addresses, offers a self-deprecating story of an early stage appearance as The Little Mermaid’s Sebastian the Crab in a school performance, and admits he was jealous of Tracey Beaker’s parent-free life.

Contemporary material is standard fare about dating, bitching about the rigamarole of being a wedding, and an exaggerated distain for those basic bitches on their ‘Eat Love Pray’ journeys. But the dark secret is he’s more like them than he might care to admit. 

Crucially, Hall confesses to not knowing who he is or what he stands for, which may be honest, but also reflects the superficiality of his comedy, fun but lightweight and always moving on whenever he threatens to scratch beneath the surface.

Nonetheless, the show’s structured well enough to tie his material up neatly, while the joy he so obviously feels at being the centre of attention spills over to the crowd, especially those who already have a connection with him from the socials. 

That online success has probably propelled him to do an hour he’s not really fully ready for yet, but the emphasis is probably on the ‘yet’ given his innate likeability.

Review date: 21 Sep 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Chelmsford Theatre