Tag: Bristol Hippodrome

Review: Matilda the Musical UK Tour

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Original review for the Reviews Hub

Matilda the Musical.jpeg

Mischief, magic, and as much charm as the original tale

‘Just because I find myself in this story, it doesn’t mean that everything is written for me’: ah, the wisdom of children – the whimsical wonder and childlike delight that children can’t wait to outgrow and adults wish for once again is the foundation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s literature. With all of Dahl’s wisdom and a little childlike wonder, Matilda the Musical is Denis Kelly’s delightful adaptation of Dahl’s Matilda, the wisest little worm of all.

A precocious child prodigy flipping through Dickens and Dostoevsky at five years old, Matilda is desperate to grow up and escape from a family – coiffed and vociferous in fantastic performances from Sebastien Torkia and Rebecca Thornhill – that prefer the sedative effects of television to the fanciful dance of their daughter’s fairy tales. Escaping to the autocratic tutelage of Crunchem Hall, Matilda is taught the toughest class of all: even teachers, like Carly Thoms’s ‘pathetic’ and empathetic Miss Honey, can’t escape from ‘fighting the creatures that you have fight each night’, even if they’re all grown up, and particularly if that creature is the terrifying Trunchball. Continue reading “Review: Matilda the Musical UK Tour” →

Review: Kinky Boots UK Tour

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Original review for the Reviews Hub

Kinky Boots UK Tour Bristol

As tough, worthy, and well-tailored as a pair of Price and Sons’ shoes 

‘Trust your feet in Price and Son, our work is tried and true: practical, pragmatical, steadfast, and steady, too’: so echoes the omnipresent theme of Price and Sons shoe factory, yet this musical is as far from practical and pragmatic as the magnificent shoes it manufactures. With music and lyrics from legendary musician Cyndi Lauper and adapted by Harvey Fierstein from the 2005 film, Kinky Boots is a musical with leather, lace, legacy, and hopes as high as its heels.

Charlie Price’s father leaves him with some very large, old-fashioned shoes, and the underperforming, ‘practical, pragmatic, and steadfast’ factory – intimidatingly industrial in David Rockwell’s well-worn, multi-levelled set – to fill. As Lola, a stylish, deliciously witty drag queen, struts into this dated, industrial, dogmatic world, she sets it alight with sequins and dancing, yet is as unsteady as Price and Sons’ outmoded men’s shoes are steady in stilettos not designed for feet of her width or weight. Seeing an opportunity to serve an ‘underserved niche’ in the footwear industry, it’s in a pair of sturdy, outlandishly stylish shoes that an unexpected friendship develops between straitlaced, lost Charlie and extroverted yet equally adrift Lola.

Yet, the soul of the show isn’t in its shoes. Continue reading “Review: Kinky Boots UK Tour” →

Review: WNO’s La Cenerentola

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Original Review: Broadway World UK

WNO's La Cenerentola

The magic’s in the music

The original Italian premiere of Rossini’s rags-to-riches opera was more morally pragmatic than magical: with a ‘goodness triumphs’ moral in its title (‘La bontà in trionfo’), Roman Catholicism restricting an unclothed foot from appearing in the performance, and nineteenth-century theatrics making transformations impractical, the music was the magic. And the music is magical, with all its coloratura, patter, and character from the principals, male chorus, and orchestra magnificently managed by Tomáš Hanus, but there’s still some magic amiss in this staging from Welsh National Opera.

La Cenerentola falls away from the French fairy tale and into the Grimm’s grotesque without a fairy godmother or twelve o’clock curfew, and Joan Font’s staging fuels the fantasy with giant mice and the suggestion that it was all a sugarcoated fever-dream danced in Joan Guillén’s garish costumes.

The opera follows in the footsteps of the fairytale Continue reading “Review: WNO’s La Cenerentola” →

Review: Shrek the Musical UK Tour

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Original review: The Reviews Hub

Shrek the Musical UK Tour

Hefty, hearty & gorgeously green

An offbeat fairytale about being a believer in happily-ever-afters for the beautiful and ogreish alike, Shrek the Musical is a hefty, hearty, gorgeously green show that lets its Freak Flag fly but its originality fall victim to fart gags and the far-greater film.

The original film won an Oscar and a legion of fans for its animation and imagination, but originality is what’s lost in the musical: though full of animated characters and moments of imagination – with magical transformations, Josh Prince’s rat-tapping choreography, and impressive puppetry – David Lindsay-Abaire’s book is indebted to the film for its laughs and adapts its famous lines and filmic beats verbatim. Whilst as bold and bright as the film, it feels less than fresh, and with lots of allusions to other musicals, some of them also from movies – from Les Misérables to The Lion King, Gypsy to Dreamgirls – forced in without rhyme or remark, the musical emphasises, albeit affectionately, the flaws and imitations of its book.

The musical – and Jeanine Tesori’s music – is at its greatest and most unforgettable with its most familiar fairytale characters, Continue reading “Review: Shrek the Musical UK Tour” →

Review: Miss Saigon UK Tour

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Original review: Underdog Reviews

Miss Saigon UK Tour

Spectacular operatic epic

The Heat is On in Miss Saigon! An operatic epic inspired by a Puccini opera, Miss Saigon is visually and vocally spectacular: Madame Butterfly with bargirls and G.I.s, it tells the tragic tale of Kim and Chris, a romance grown and gutted by the violence of the Vietnam War.

Miss Saigon shares more than its music-makers with Les Misérables: from Schönberg’s motif-rich music to Boublil’s overlying lyrics, Miss Saigon is also sung-through, has a thieving entertainer who thrives on surviving – Red Concepción’s Engineer is magnetising – is thrillingly theatrical, and has the same thematic threat of revolution on intimate romance. Yet, far from a French revolution, the Fall of Saigon is a tragedy from only forty years ago: Continue reading “Review: Miss Saigon UK Tour” →