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| High flyers: The Spice Girls after naming a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 plane 'Spice One' in their honor at Los Angeles International Airport in December 2007 |
At the event, the producer Judy Craymer, who brought Mamma Mia! to the stage, will confirm the show will open before Christmas at the Piccadilly Theatre, London.
And, after protracted negotiations, she will be joined by the five girls themselves — Victoria Beckham, Mel B, Emma Bunton, Mel C and Geri Halliwell. Jennifer Saunders, who wrote the script for the musical will be there, too.But it is a singular irony that the ‘Girl Power’ musical has done little to bring the five Spice Girls together. They may have once sung: ‘Friendship never ends’ but the association between them remains uneasy as the women approach their 40th birthdays.
They have agreed — under a three-line whip from former manager Simon Fuller — that they will appear together for today’s press conference and be in the same room together on opening night.
But that is absolutely it. They won’t give joint interviews to a forthcoming ITV documentary tracing their lives from the early Spice Girls days. And they certainly won’t sing together or reunite as a band.
Indeed, Mel C and Mel B took to Twitter to express their disappointment at not being involved in the Diamond Jubilee concert earlier this month.
Mel C said: ‘Bit miffed I’m not down at Buckingham Palace’; while Mel B tweeted, ‘Makes me sooo sad spice girls wasn’t part of the queens jubilee, break my heart big time, i was so up for it, watched some of it on tv, amazing!’
But it wasn’t for lack of asking that the Spice Girls weren’t on stage that night. The group had been approached. Mel B, Mel C, Geri and Emma Bunton were all available. However, Victoria Beckham told one newspaper that they were all too busy with ‘lots on our plates’.
In truth, the only person who was ‘too busy’ was Mrs Beckham herself. She and her husband, David, remain Simon Fuller’s biggest clients. They are so close that she even uses his offices as a base for UK meetings of her fashion label, and she regularly parks her daughter, Harper, in his office with a nanny and bodyguard while she works.
Victoria, 38, who has made a success of her second career as a fashion designer, has no interest in revisiting her first as a singer.
In a recent interview, she conceded that she hadn’t been any great shakes as a pop star and found the whole episode rather an embarrassment.
‘I enjoy what I’m doing now so much more,’ she said. ‘Being in the Spice Girls was fantastic, but I was never going to be the best singer and it wasn’t my passion.’
As you might imagine, this may put Fuller in a tricky position from time to time as he also represents the other Spice Girls. This, perhaps, led to the snarky comments from the rest of the group who would have liked to take another bow — if only Victoria had consented to join them.
Eighteen years after the girls were first brought together, fierce feuds divide the group. The principal battle-line is the one drawn between Victoria and Mel B, 37 — although there have been several spectacular fallings-out in recent years between Geri and Mel C, who objected to Geri’s attitude during their ill-fated reunion in 2007, and another between Geri and Victoria, fuelled apparently by jealousy.
Friends of Mel B say she and Victoria haven’t spoken in two years — and it would take a miracle for them to reconcile.
The origins of the latest feud are petty. The pair apparently fell out when Victoria declined to lend Mel a dress from her collection to wear on her reality show in the U.S.
This may have been wise as the show, Mel B: It’s A Scary World, fell far short of the upscale image of the Victoria Beckham brand.
Mel tried to get her solo career off the ground amid heavily staged bickering with second husband Stephen Belafonte. Her daughter by first husband Jimmy Gulzar and Angel, a love-child by Hollywood actor Eddie Murphy, looked on.
Mel B and Victoria pointedly send
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