David Baddiel’s AniMalcolm The Musical – Worthing and Touring

David Baddiel’s AniMalcolm The Musical was reviewed at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing. The tour continues.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Following in the footsteps of David Walliams, David Baddiel’s own children’s book AniMalcolm now finds itself adapted for the stage (by Adam Fletcher-Forde). This musical version utilises only a small cast of six, but between them playing 35 roles, most of which are animals. Behind it all is the Story Pocket Theatre company, now well known for a number of highly successful shows in recent years.

AniMalcolm is the story of 11-year-old Malcom, the lone member of a pet-obsessed family, who doesn’t like animals. His life is turned upside down when he visits a farm and meets a magic goat.

I really wanted to like AniMalcolm. The combined reputations of Story Pocket and of Baddiel gave this production a great head start. And, it has to be said, this isn’t designed for me. Nor is it mean spirited, negative or particularly offensive in any way. But I found surprisingly large parts of it somewhat dull.

Almost all of Act I and a major chunk of Act II follow an unfortunately repetitive formula, consisting of a number of vignettes, loosely tied together by the story that bookends them. This does showcase elements of design, particularly costuming from Jacqueline Trousdale, which is impressively inventive but can become predictable when the story comes almost to a standstill.

The performers are generally excellent. Everyone puts everything into their role (or should I say roles?) and it really shows. There were times when I really didn’t notice that Malcolm’s father also happened to be a large, lavishly accented German shepherd, nor that his grandfather had morphed into a bilingual pig. Their vocals, too, are admirable.

However, there isn’t a whole lot to work with in that department. David Perkins’ score, while joyful, doesn’t contain more than perhaps one song that is especially memorable. I would think to blame this on myself – as I said, this is not made for my benefit – but the children nearby didn’t seem particularly enamoured by the music either. There was a bit of nodding along and some laughter here and there, but much most of this was not musically induced. It seems almost as if this would have worked better as a straight play.

Speaking of humour, there are some quite funny moments. While a large portion of the jokes do focus on silly names and monkeys hurling excrement at children, here and there are passing lines aimed directly at the adults; unfortunately, I could count them on the fingers of one hand.

I would have been happier, I feel, had they simply leant into the childishness of it and left out the half-formed swear-words and Trotsky the dog, on Orwell farm. Instead, everything feels a bit undecided. In essence, while enjoyable for the younger theatregoers, the show is pitched a lot lower than other much smarter musicals available for kids at the moment – there’s a lot of wasted potential.

Tom Martland