Madagascar The Musical – New Wimbledon Theatre and Touring

Madagascar The Musical at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London then on tour until 1 June 2019.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

This is a four-star musical only because the two grandchildren I brought along thought it was “pretty awesome”. It is colourful and always lively but not grown-up entertainment.

For any adult minus kids in tow, it has brilliant puppet work and energetic ensemble funky dance routines but the story and jokey dialogue are paper-thin and the songs nothing special.

George Noriega and Joel Someillan are responsible for the original music and lyrics for Kevin Del Aguila’s book but it is a hit song from 1994 that everybody knows – ‘I Like to Move It’, written by Erick Morillo – that really gets the audience going.

It not only lights up the start of Act II in a crazy, surreal dance led by Julien, King of the Lemurs, in a terrific performance by Jo Parsons, walking on his knees, but a reprise of this infectious routine brings the show to a rousing standing-ovation climax.

This the UK premiere of a show that played on Broadway in 2011. It is pretty faithful to the much-loved DreamWorks animated movie from 2005. We have four mates, Marty the zebra, Alex the lion, Melman the giraffe and Gloria the hippo fed up in a Manhattan zoo.

Marty wants to see the world. He escapes and the other three follow him, worried about him being on his own. They are captured and put in crates (great set design by Tom Rogers) on a boat heading for Kenya.The boat capsizes and somehow they end up on the island of Madagascar, hence the show’s title.

Alex is handsomely played and sung by 2016 X Factor winner Matt Terry in his stage debut; sassy Timmika Ramsay, as hippo Gloria, has the most striking voice; Antoine Murray-Straughan makes the most of the eccentric Marty; and Jamie Lee-Morgan has the most creative puppet, the long-necked, melancholy giraffe. But it is chief lemur Parsons who steals the show.

Credit to Fabian Aloise for dazzling choreography, Max Humphries for remarkable puppet design and director Kirk Jameson for letting it all hang out, even the dubious joke about the rectal thermometer and a surreal routine involving talking steaks. I’ll say it again: Talking steaks. That’s mad, mad, mad Madagascar for you.

Wimbledon is the first port of call on a long, long tour which will have taken in 32 cities and towns in the UK and Ireland by the time it finishes ten months hence.

Jeremy Chapman