Jamie Birkett in Nutcracker! The Musical at the Pleasance Theatre, London. Picture: Pamela Raith Photography
Nutcracker! The Musical continues at the Pleasance Theatre, London until 3 January 2016.
Star rating: one star ★ ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩
Imagine Tchaikovsky arranged by Sullivan with libretto by Gilbert when they were both having an uncharacteristically bad day. Add a director, Ollie Fielding, who can’t apprarently make up his mind what sort of show he wants it to be so it keeps ricocheting between genres. Miscast a few actors and you’ve got Nutcracker! The Musical. It gives me no pleasure to say it, but this show is a definite dud.
Because The Nutcracker is associated with dance in the mind of almost anyone likely to see this show, it’s a distinct disadvantage when the fragments of dance included are awkward and contrived – in between the interludes of overacted, unconvincing dialogue. The ensemble of 14 tries very hard but the material they’re working with does them no favours.
The familiar Tchaikovsky melodies are set to banal words. Thus we get Leigh Rhiannon Coggins as a less than ethereal Sugar Plum Fairy, singing her famous number as if it were a pastiche in a revue, but I don’t think that was how it was meant to come across in this show. Actors are, moreover, often forced by the constraints of the musical arrangements (by Bruce Keisling and Paul Rigano) to sing in inappropriate keys and registers.
There is also a problem with the narrative which is a long way from Tchaikovsky’s interpretation of ETA Hoffmann. The whole of Act I offers a rather drawn out back story about how the prince comes to be reduced to a wooden nutcracker. The rest of the plot, including a rather brief and unspectacular trip to the Land of Sweets, is compressed into Act II.
The best thing in this show is Jamie Birkett as Mouseyrinks. She packs plenty of evil stage presence and her dying number based on Swan Lake is a very good joke. So is her operatic springing back to life from apparent death three times to sing yet another verse.
Of course I stayed until the end. But it’s a very bad sign when on press night – yes on press night – a significant number of people leave at the interval.
Susan Elkin
SHARE THIS POST:
Comments are closed.