Picture: Mark Senior
Dog Man: The Musical continues at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London until 16 August 2026.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Based on four of Dav Pilkey’s immensely popular graphic Dog Man stories, this is a decent enough children’s musical (by Kevin Del Aguila and Brad Alexander) although it’s unremarkable.
George (Ricardo Mendes) and Harold (Peter Lavery) have been excluded from the year five musical at school so they set out to create their own. They give us a great deal of that for-children thing which turns over acting into physical theatre and “stage presence” as in pantomime. It would be wearing in other contexts but works well enough here.
The cast of six are all skilled, watchable actors and singers, but Sam Kipling is outstanding as the feline villain. He uses his expressive face, lithe body and a pleasing range of funny voices to excellent effect. He has, of course, appeared in several Sasha Regan G&S productions and we benefit from his crisp diction and generally sparky, faux malevolent manner here too.
Also impressive is Rebecca-Jo Roberts as the homeless, vulnerable kitten – singing beautifully. It is apparently specified by Pilkey that Dog Man should never speak or sing and Renan Teodoro manages to mime canine reactions pretty convincingly. Of course they all play lots of roles to drive the stories along and Vanessa Dumatey is good at everything she does – including a big full belt number in the second half.
Directed and choreographed by Jen Wineman, it’s all suitably slick and pacy at one hour, 40 minutes, including interval, but at heart it’s just another book-based children’s show with the usual enthusiastic pedalling of merchandise.
Susan Elkin
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