This musical comedy about billionaire tech gurus Steve Jobs (Kane Oliver Parry) and Bill Gates (Dan Buckley) is, in all likelihood, not going to enlighten you about the making of these Silicon Valley founders.
A young Gates (of Microsoft) meets Jobs (of Apple and iPhones) at a Homebrew Computer Club competition in the 1970s. Jobs wins it and from hereon the rivalry is on – or that is how this production spins it.
Capturing the vaguest approximation of the relationship between the men, there is little fidelity to fact, or nuance, or penetrating psychological unpicking. But it is a highly entertaining, well put together parody all the same, however cartoonish in its portrayal of the two central players. It takes swipes at technology (from old-school cameras to printers and the limited life of Apple products) and the nerdy megalomania of tech culture itself.
Under the direction of Nick Winston, characters resemble the geeks from TV series The IT Crowd. To a lesser degree, it is about self-acceptance from those deemed oddballs by their school bullies, mainly through the character of Gates. Jobs is, by contrast, a visionary hippy and self-serving ladies’ man whose charisma Gates envies. Both are ridiculed and brilliantly performed.
Writer-lyricists Jordan Allen-Dutton and Erik Weiner give the show a high school style makeover while Hal Goldberg’s score brings easy, fun tunes. There are romances for the men in Sally (Elise Zavou), a Xerox researcher with a social conscience, and fellow nerd Myrtle (Teleri Hughes) for Gates. Their real-life love lives, and wives, are nowhere to be found.
Real life is ignored or smoothed over on the whole: there is a legal battle, which follows some facts around Apple’s suing of Microsoft in 1988, and it ends in an out-of-court settlement, but without really telling us how or why. But it includes a thoroughly amusing rap battle between Gates and Jobs – a highlight of the show – which leads to the sudden transformation of Gates from an insecure tyrant into a fairy godfather of sorts. He steps away from Microsoft willingly here and devotes himself to his charitable foundation. Jobs’ death from cancer is ignored, too, although there is a – very funny – song in which he writes an email to God (with lots of ccs) because he thinks he is dying.
While it fails in its factual history, this is a compelling parody of the tech age, then and now, with heaps of the fun factor.
At Cowbarn at Underbelly, Bristo Square, Edinburgh, until 25 August
