School of Rock – Palace Theatre, Manchester and Touring

School of Rock continues at the Palace Theatre, Manchester until 15 January 2022 and then tours the UK until 13 August 2022.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Andrew Lloyd Webber still doesn’t seem like the obvious person to have brought Richard Linklater’s boisterous 2003 family movie about the power of rock‘n’roll to the stage.

And yet, six years after the resulting musical – with a book written, in another surprising twist, by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes – debuted on Broadway and five years after its Olivier-winning West End transfer, this riotously fun, family-friendly touring production proves that it was one of Lloyd Webber’s savviest decisions to date.

Lloyd Webber obviously has previous when it comes to rock musicals, having popularised the rock opera form, alongside Tim Rice, with Joseph and Superstar early in his career, but his output has been rather more gentile – or, as some would say, safe – over the last few decades. But then he also has a track record for choosing unusual source materials for his musical masterworks (T. S. Eliot, the Rev. W Awdry, Gaston Leroux) and also shown a real knack for picking movies (Sunset Boulevard, Whistle Down the Wind) to adapt.

That said, as the stage version of School of Rock hews so close to the original film, transposing set-pieces and whole sections of dialogue almost verbatim, quite a lot of the credit for its success has to go to original screenwriter Mike White and director Linklater. The warmth and plucky, underdog spirit of the musical, as well as the way that the events escalate – as slacker musician Dewey inveigles his way into a substitute teacher role and enlists his pupils in a coveted Battle of the Bands contest – owes a great debt to the building blocks established by the original movie.

Initially Lloyd Webber and lyricist Glenn Slater’s enjoyable but not especially memorable pop rock songs don’t do much more than pad out the story. And it’s telling that the three original songs from the movie, written by Sammy James and screenwriter White, are the ones that live longest in the memory, especially the raucous, climatic title track, which helps to provide the show with its rock concert-like finale.

But what Lloyd Webber and Fellowes do successfully bring to the table is a greater emphasis on the children and their relationships with their overbearing parents (effectively portrayed by the ensemble). One of the show’s biggest pluses is still the chance to see some extremely talented young people performing with uninhibited joy and playing their instruments live.

Various combinations of child performers rotate on a show-by-show basis, but on press night it was the turn of, among others, Joseph Sheppard as guitarist Zack, Eva McGrath as drummer Freddy and Souparnika Nair as timid vocalist Tomika to wow the crowds. Special mention should also go to, on this occasion, Florrie May Wilkinson who brings a great comic attitude to class bossy boots and band manager Summer and copes admirably with the demands of ‘Time to Play’, the wordy and fast-moving song that opens Act II.

Laurence Connor’s direction comes into its own when marshalling the kids in their big, affecting Matilda-like ensemble number ‘If Only You Would Listen’, also where Joann M Hunter’s choreography is at its most effective. Mick Potter’s sound keeps things pin sharp while Anna Louizos’ impressively huge, mobile set pieces create the likes of school corridors and Dewey’s flat with admirable speed, even if they don’t always move smoothly into place.

Everything is a little more heightened and exaggerated in this musical version. The school is stuffier and stricter, and Dewey is even more slobby and dishevelled, which means the contrast between the two is more marked. The production, therefore, demands its lead performer to pull off the difficult trick of recalling the performance, intonation and mannerism of the film’s larger-than-life star, Jack Black, while also making Dewey even more buffoonish and childlike. Alex Tomkins – who shares the role of Dewey with Jake Sharp – has a great rapport with his young co-stars and keeps his Dewey on the right side of believable, while avoiding the trap of making his performance too much of an identikit of Black.

Rebecca Lock does the most to make her role as buttoned down principal Rosalie as distinctive from her big-screen counterpart – the incomparable Joan Cusack – as possible. She gets to show off considerable vocal range in the operatic warbling of Mozart’s ‘Queen of the Night’ and shows off some rock chick moves in the plaintive ‘Where Did the Rock Go?’, probably the best of Lloyd Webber and Slater’s original songs. She also combines charmingly with Tomkins as Dewey and Rosalie’s more avert romance develops as the story progresses.

Chris Bartlett