December 20, 2005
This isn't a Christmas Panto, it's a good old-fashioned Show, with songs and dances. If you're taking children to it they will probably love it (mine did) but your chief entertainment is more likely to be seeing the answers to the question "I wonder how they're going to do that on stage?". So, let's start with the good news. The sets and costumes are very colourful and pretty, and the special effects are nicely done. I particularly liked the giant green Oz head on the screen, its lips moving thanks to a tangled Heath Robinson contrivance of pipes and gears in the background. The songs and dances were splendid, with teams of children playing the Munchkins to a pre-recorded sound track. Amanda Barrie was a hissable Wicked Witch of the West. Debbie Chapman, who played Dorothy, is a talented singer, whose flexible, expressive voice is capable of both tender nuance and belt-it-out power. She was clearly not in any need of amplification, which brings us to the bad news. Why, in a perfectly functioning proper theatre, was it necessary to mike up all the performers and connect them to a sound system that was turned up FAR TOO LOUD? It was quite overpowering - I know some people complained about it - and totally unnecessary, as countless productions have been successfully staged in this theatre without it. And also, why were all the performances simply copies of the ones we all know and love from the great 1939 film version? This must have been a conscious decision on the part of the director and producer. This Dorothy imitated Judy Garland's to perfection, the Cowardly Lion was a most talented rip-off of Bert Lahr's, and every strangely accented tone of Glinda the Good Witch of the North was rendered identically to Billie Burke's. The only distinction that could be made was when some of the British performers were not quite up to snuff with their American accents. It was perhaps unfortunate for them that the movie was on TV the day before the press viewing, thus enabling us to make very close, and not very favourable, comparisons between the originals and their copies. Surely when you are putting on a stage production you have the chance to do things differently from the movie - as with the fantastically creative, exciting stage version of The Lion King? To slavishly imitate the movie, however diligently, seems kind of lazy and sloppy, and rather a fraud on the paying audience, who could have stayed home and watched the video for much less money.