When I attended form 2 camp at Waianakarua back in the very early 1990s, the girl with the greatest kudos was the one who brought along speakers and plentiful supplies of batteries so that we could all listen to the music from her Sony Walkman. The cassette getting the most play that year was by boy band de jour, New Kids on the Block.

The ballads crooned us off to sleep in our tents at night, while the essentially impotent street-fighting jeers of ‘Hangin’ Tough’ spurred on our day-tramp prep in the morning. In hindsight, the Knight brothers and their posse were possibly as deluded about the potential of their musical longevity as we were, but that didn’t stop us from having ardent adolescent faith in their ability. 

Faith is the underpinning message in Altar Boyz, which is having its New Zealand premiere at the Fortune Theatre. The Altar Boyz exemplify the boy band model, which is as old as pop music itself. They are five young men who fit five clear types: the heartthrob wholesome leader, the swarthy Latino, the troubled and mildly dangerous strayer, the ‘intellect’, and the charmer whose sexual orientation seems somewhat dubious – if you’re still a tweenie.

The point of difference with the Altar Boyz is that they are a Christian boy band. They’re in town to alter your minds and raise the praise. 

The New York production of Altar Boyz won the 2005 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical and the 2006 and 2007 Broadway.com Audience Favourite Award, and it is clear why. This is an unashamedly tongue-in-cheek, multiple pun-per minute, and satirical musical delight.

While Altar Boyz doesn’t offer any particular innovations on the boy band model – apart from the obvious and prominent Christian element – the joie de vivre with which the production is delivered ensures hilarity galore. 

For the Fortune production, the theatre has been transformed into a space reminiscent of a stadium concert. The set (Peter King) and lighting design (Joe Hayes) is essentially sparse but comes alive with dry ice and stadium-style lighting.  

As you enter the theatre, the Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody’ is playing to set the tone, and from what I can see around me, the audience is embracing this, allowing themselves to enjoy the synth beats and unapologetically sing along to the chorus that anywhere else we would deny knowing the words to. Tonight was a full house, which undoubtedly added to the stadium feeling.

The triple threats who play the roles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan and Abraham give a high-octane performance and their endurance is to be applauded. The show is 90 minutes of mainly song and dance, and the actors barely have any down time. While not every note is pitch-perfect, and I did wonder at times about the quality of the sound system, they maintain the energy throughout the show.

Acknowledgement must go to choreographer Mariana Dogum for the extremely slick and genre-appropriate dance moves with their cunning and witty incorporation of Christian symbolism and gesture including genuflections and pop-styled pietas. 

The jokes and puns come quick and fast, and possibly what saves the script from trite cliché is that the writers have so fully milked and pillaged their source for laughs. We are introduced to each band member with their own take on the formation of the group in a section entitled ‘The genesis according to…’

Luke (Nick Purdie) has just returned from the New Horizon Rejuvenation Center where he has been treated for “exhaustion” and young male audience members are urged to preserve their virginity until their wedding night no matter how “Mary Mag-delicious” their girlfriends may be.

Juan (Will Barling) is the group’s token Latino and sings of ‘La Vida Eternal’ a la Ricky Martin or Enrique Iglesias, while the bands’ commandments include “Thou shall anoint thy hair with product.”

Adding some diversity, the group also includes a Jewish boy called Abraham (David Sutherland), complete with gold yarmulke.

Many of the best lines of the show are in the song lyrics. Unfortunately, a few of these are lost to me, and other audience members I check with, due to some briefly dropped enunciation. However, the songs again highlight and celebrate all that is saccharinely delightful and deplorable in the boy band genre.

The two crowd favourites are the ballad ‘Something About You’ headlined by Matthew (Guy Langford) in which he invites a young (and commendably poised, I might add) woman from the audience up on stage to be the subject of his affections for the evening, and Mark’s (Hadley R. Taylor) confessional ‘Epiphany’. While it isn’t quite the confession we are expecting, it does provide humour in spades.

The risk with staging a show that is essentially a concert satire (and I think I detected some of the musical tones of This is Spinal Tap in the opening section) is that it will run dry on dramatic impetus and essentially have nowhere to go. The narrative driver in Altar Boyz is introduced in the form of the Soul Sensor DX12 which is used to gauge the number of doubters or those with questionable souls in the audience and on stage.

The Soul Sensor requires all of us to have complete faith and when the number of unbelievers rises perilously the show briefly has the frenzied air of a fundamentalist or Pentecostal service, albeit without the strychnine drinking, snake handling or speaking in tongues.

Ultimately the audience does have a lot of faith in the Altar Boyz and their band, who must get a mention, especially musical director Jason Te Mete. Director Shane Anthony has delivered a sharp production and the standing ovation (and squeals) are entirely deserved by the cast and crew alike. The boyz were definitely “crunk”, a term I hadn’t heard before the show, which means a mixture of charisma and spunk and is bound to be prominently featured in urban parlance in no time.

I did some nostalgic ‘research’ and looked up the New Kids on the Block on You Tube. ‘Hangin’ Tough’ has had less than a million hits, which seems surprising, given the hysteria that surrounded them in their day. While the music video is somewhat dated and not as polished as the oeuvre of recent boy bands, the ingredients are still the same.

I would highly recommend Altar Boyz to anyone, young or old who wants to revisit, enjoy and celebrate or shamelessly laugh at the appeal of this particular phenomenon. We’ve all got a little room in us for this type of belief, and this Altar Boyz is a safe and fun opportunity to confess this. 

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