Picture: Roy Tan
Little Miss Sunshine continues at the Arcola Theatre, London until 11 May 2019, before touring.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
When it comes to adapting a film into a musical, the choice of source material can have a tremendous impact. Choose a barely known film and you get to play with the form, at the expense of immediate brand recognition (think Romantics Anonymous); choose a hugely popular film and you risk having to deliver the audience what the celluloid version has led them to expect – Disney’s Aladdin being a case in point.
Little Miss Sunshine sits somewhere in the middle. The 2006 film, written by Michael Arndt, was something of a cult hit, and those who like the film tend to adore it. For others, though, this tale of a dysfunctional family taking an impromptu road trip in a beat-up VW minibus will be a brand new experience when viewing it on stage.
And like the film original, the stage musical is something of an oddity. Previously produced Off-Broadway, James Lapine’s script adapts Arndt’s screenplay with a light touch, allowing the absurdity of the central family to come through. Gabriel Vick is the nominal head of the Hoover family, with hopes that the blog he started in redundancy is about to make them millions.
He is surrounded by his father (Gary Wilmot), thrown out of his retirement community for drug use; a son, Dwayne (Sev Keoshgerian) who has taken a vow of silence until he achieves his dream of becoming a test pilot; and brother-in-law Frank (Paul Keating), a literature professor who is recovering from a suicide attempt after having his heart broken by the student with whom he was having an unethical affair.
Within this family maelstrom, Laura Pitt-Pulford’s Sheryl is a semblance of calm. But the real rock of the family is Olive, the self-confident youngster, played on press night by Sophie Hartley-Booth in a role she shares with Lily Mae Denman and Evie Gibson.
It is Olive’s positivity and affection for her crazy family that binds the Hoovers together, and goes a long way to engendering the same feelings in her audience. One can quite believe that the Hoovers would elect to drive 500 miles in a clapped-out camper van to give her the opportunity to appear in a beauty pageant.
Initially, though, the attempt to re-create a road trip on the Arcola’s small thrust stage feels like a losing battle. Director Mehmet Ergen elects to represent the van as a spinning podium, an approach which denies the sense of physical forward momentum even as the characters themselves head out on a more obvious emotional journey.
As the play progresses, the representation of the van becomes looser, physical elements gradually disappearing. By the end of the family’s journey, the drive is represented by the actors running: the least like a VW minibus that may be, but it also feels the most dramatically honest portrayal.
Elsewhere, things are more uneven. William Finn’s songs nestle nicely within Lapine’s book, although musically they feel like they belong to a different era. Pitt-Pulford and Vick, as one might expect, give their all to their numbers, and Wilmot has a blast as the foul-mouthed pensioner whose life lessons for his teenage grandson are as amusing as they are designed to shock.
The biggest problem with Little Miss Sunshine is one of tone. Part of the appeal of the original film was how seamlessly it melded moments of high farce with scenes of family introspection. That mix is less well handled here. It becomes particularly obvious in Act II, as Imelda Warren-Green delivers a pair of scene-stealing supporting characters which, although hilariously delivered, almost feel like they have come from a separate production.
Following an extended opening run at the Arcola, Little Miss Sunshine will go on a road trip of its own, touring the UK. One can hope that receiving venues’ larger stages will help this comedy musical open up and breathe a little more. At the moment, it feels like it needs a bolt of the self-confidence and assuredness that its title character possesses.
Scott Matthewman
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