Darren Hart and Sharon Ballard in Jungle Rumble at the Fortune Theatre, London. Picture: Helen Maybanks
Jungle Rumble continues at the Fortune Theatre, London until 20 February 2022.
Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩
This 45-minute musical for young children sits quite happily under the set for The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre. The songs are jolly and varied in style from Calypso to Rap to ballad. These are songs which children who attend classes for 4-7s at drama school Perform will already know.
All seven members of the cast are strong singers and there’s some nifty movement choreographed by Frank Thompson. In particular, Darren Hart is a bit of a show stealer as the bouncy, jokey Cheetah, Rachel Lea-Grey offers us an attractive young Zebra learning to overcome self-effacement and Carole Stennett’s cobra is slitheringly convincing. Ben Stock shows a lot of versatility as a ridiculed English colonial gent, leader of the monkey troop and a crocodile.
And Lotte Collett’s costume designs are inspired – just enough animal hints to make us believe in them. Sharon Ballard as Eeli the elephant, for instance, is all in grey with a trunk protruding from her chest – she creates an elephantine ambience by moving it with her hand.
But the crude political message in this show is shallow and overdone. Yes of course we need to save endangered animals and to conserve the jungle but absurd, outdated stereotyping of the sort of people who once killed animals for taxidermy is hardly likely to get the message over to young children. Beware of laboured indoctrination masquerading as educative entertainment.
Moreover I wasn’t comfortable with the zoological and biological solecisms. If Snow the White Lion, eventually rescued, is the last of her species how did she come to be pregnant?
And cheetahs, for goodness sake, are carnivores. “Don’t trust a cheetah with your Ryvita/With just one packet I’ll make a racket” is a witty lyric but surely this show is supposed to be making some serous points not teaching nonsense? I winced at the rhyming of Guatamala with koala too. Sorry, folks. But koalas live in Australia.
We owe it to children to entertain them truthfully rather than patronising them with this sort of stuff.
Susan Elkin
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