This turbo-charged revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jeremy Sams’ musical adaptation serves up a hybrid theatre-cum-cinema experience. The proscenium arch is reframed as a luminous screen and the production pays clear homage to the 1939 film. But nostalgic imagery of rural Kansas is spliced with a futuristic world and we are taken to an Oz that is big, kitsch and unfamiliar.
Directed by Nikolai Foster, the adventures of Dorothy and her friends seem reconceived as a Steven Spielberg-style action movie, the back screen resembling a VR game. We slalom down the Yellow Brick Road and into Emerald City, which looks like New York’s Times Square with a green wash.
The central conceit for the story is inspired: Dorothy (Georgina Onuorah) is an outsider, at odds with the community in Kansas, which might be gesturing to America’s pre-civil rights history of segregation, and all its exclusions. She is innocent yet steely, and Onuorah has a truly glorious voice, leaving us with goosebumps in her numerous renditions of Over the Rainbow.
But the kinetic screen and relentless bigness of Harold Arlen’s music (with additional music by Lloyd Webber) often swallows up everything around it. The lyrics by EY Harburg (with additions by Tim Rice), are nondescript but the book – from the children’s novel by L Frank Baum – sounds saccharine and old-fashioned against the futuristic effects.
Previously seen at Leicester’s Curve, the show is full of imagination and skewed realities but throws too much at us and it feels like we are not so much inside Dorothy’s dream but an arcade game or hallucinatory quiz show. When it quietens, the performances shine. And when the screen projects the big empty skies and tarmac of a road movie, the story takes life.
Gary Wilmot makes a convincing Wizard and Louis Gaunt is a great Scarecrow, balancing the role of loose-jawed simpleton with quicksilver, soft-boned movement. Ashley Banjo, as the Tin Man, and Jason Manford, as the Cowardly Lion, are less remarkable.
The spirit of pantomime is channelled by the Wicked Witch of the West (Dianne Pilkington) while Christina Bianco’s Glinda is less flat and brings emotion to Already Home, along with Jacqui Dubois as Aunt Em.
But the biggest standout is Toto the dog, an utterly gorgeous puppet (controlled by Ben Thompson) and counterpoint to all the hi-tech wizardry on stage. As diminutive as he may be, he is the quiet star of this show.
