Cry-Baby, The Musical – Arcola Theatre

Picture: Charlie Flint

Cry-Baby, The Musical continues at the Arcola Theatre, London until 12 April 2025

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

John Waters’ 1990 film Cry-Baby became the second of the writer-director’s movies to become a Broadway musical when, in 2008, book writers Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, who had won a Tony for their adaptation of Hairspray, collaborated once again.

With songs by David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger, Cry-Baby, The Musical now arrives at London’s Arcola Theatre. Like its predecessor, this Waters adaptation is set in 1950s Baltimore; once again, it features a teenaged outsider trying to join a group to which girls like her just aren’t supposed to belong.

But where Hairspray had Tracy Turnblad seek to join a television dance show, here we have strait-laced ‘square’ Allison Vernon-Williams (Lulu-Mae Pears), who falls for Adam Davidson’s Wade ‘Cry-Baby’ Walker, the leader of the local gang, who all have a penchant for leather bikers’ jackets.

This culture clash makes the musical feel much more aligned with Grease, another show set in this era, rather than the clean-cut Hairspray. It is noticeably spikier and saucier than either, though – Allison is more aware of her new crush’s real life than Sandy was, and the gang’s sexually promiscuous antics feel much more salacious than any of the antics going down at Rydell High. If anything, Cry-Baby feels closer to the harder edge that Grease possessed in its first nascent (and unsuccessful) outing in Chicago prior to the sanitisation that took it to Broadway

Musically, Javerbaum and Schlesinger’s songs reek of the era, combining dirty rock ‘n’ roll from Cry-Baby and his gang of ‘Drapes’ with a doo-wop sound from the clean-cut close harmonies of the Squares’ Whiffles, a four-piece led by Elliot Allinson’s oily Baldwin Blandish. The realisation of songs from the era is so precise that it does tester on the edge of parody; it also means that comparisons to other musicals which set themselves within the same milieu are inevitable.

And so one can point to the greater accessibility of numbers from Grease, or the more successful comedic pastiches Menken and Ashman achieved in Little Shop of Horrors. There’s a sense, too, that the first two thirds of Act I is dominated by a sequence of songs with similar tempo and sound. Coupled with a book that takes much the same amount of time to really get going, and it makes for a start to the musical that, while dancing to a steady beat, nevertheless feels ponderous.

Thankfully, both variety in songwriting and incident within the book pick up before the interval. That is not to say that Act I does not contain some key moments. Chad Saint Louis provides the strongest vocal performance as the belting bad boy Dupree, while Eleanor Walsh’s Lenora Frigid, an obsessive stalker whose obsession over Cry-Baby takes both book and song lyrics to evermore demented heights, is definitely the comedy highlight.

As the romantic leads, Davidson and Pears both grapple with, and illuminate, roles that are nowhere near as vividly written on the page as their castmates’. Together with a lively ensemble, they help bring a show to life that, at times, struggles to exist within the confines of the Arcola’s stage space. Scenes where the whole cast must be on stage require actors to line the aisles or stand behind the audience, while the show’s best dance number (a delightfully frantic prison escape) necessitates a large piece of stage furniture to be removed and propped against a wall in order for there to be any space for it at all.

Fans of Waters’ original film (and, despite it being a flop on release, there are many) may rankle at some of the changes made to Cry-Baby’s backstory to allow it to be explored and resolved satisfactorily. Such changes do make the denouement seem a little pat and predictable, which is a shame when the dialogue and lyrics threaten something much more subversive and unusual that we actually get.

Still, director Mehmet Ergen ensures that Cry-Baby, The Musical is arguably a closer rendition of Waters’ naughtiness and eclecticism than its more famous, more successful and more polished predecessor. This show may be no Hairspray, but it’s still a lot of fun.

Scott Matthewman