101 Dalmatians the Musical Playhouse Theatre Edinburgh 20th November 2024 Review
101 Dalmatians the Musical is at the Playhouse Theatre Edinburgh this week (until Saturday 23 November). Probably the first thing to note here is that although the stage show is based on the 1956 children's novel "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" written by Dodie Smith, it has no connection with the Disney franchise or the much loved Disney animated film of 1961.
To even attempt to bring 101 Dalmatians to the stage is in itself a big achievement, as the story is a complex one with many different scenes, plus of course the problem of how you deal with the dogs, and there the options are limited – live animals, actors dressed as animals, animation, or puppets (or a combination of all of these). Over the course of various stage productions of 101 Dalmatians different methods have been tried, and this one has taken the puppet approach, similar to the one that has proved so successful on stage for “War Horse” or “The Lion King”.
In this production, there is no doubt about the care that has been taken to create these puppets, or the skills of bringing them to life on stage. Here of course, as this is a musical, the main puppet handlers have to be able to sing too and the dogs have very different songs from each other to give them individuality. The dogs also have a different style of song to separate them from their humans as this story, as per the original, is really seen from the dogs’ point of view. Creating new and memorable stage songs for humans is difficult enough, but for puppet dogs even more difficult, and composer Douglas Hodge has overall done a fine job of giving us all a mixture of classic and contemporary sounding songs for this show.
The big problem for me is the production and script overall, as I was never sure tonight where the target audience was. A lot of those issues for me came from this updated take on Cruella De Vil (performed tonight by Rachel Lea-Gray and not Fay Tozer) and her two incompetent assistants Casper (Charles Brunton) and Jasper (Danny Hendrix), who are all straight out of the classic pantomime mould of characters and sadly, with this show being on stage so close to Christmas, it so often had that feel of a pantomime about it and I was just waiting for someone to shout “Behind You” for much of the evening.
Cruella De Vil is such an iconic character that it seemed odd to not play heavily upon her many strengths and in this case make her little more than someone who was a heartless killer. Cruella still gets a few good songs though, “Animal Lover” being one of them. Some scenes with Cruella just seem to break the narrative rather than move it forward in any way too. A reminder to Cruella – do not run your big knife (looking such an obviously fake one), down the side of dog cages that are supposed to be electrified. Rachel Lea-Gray does her best with these songs, but there is little that she can do with some of the dialogue.
As always, the dogs’ humans have little to do here, but here they are enjoyable to watch and Danielle (Jessie Elland) always adds some depth to a character that can never really be in the spotlight.
To be fair to this show, there are a few scenes of genuine tenderness and emotion around these dogs, and the puppet handlers manage them well. There are moments too where the dialogue and the music for the dogs works very well. There were a lot of children in the seats around me this evening and all too often they did not seem to be engaging with this show in the way that I expected them to and the bulk of the applause was coming from adults for some of the show songs. Maybe 21st century children are too used to CGI graphics on their own mobile (or other) screens these days?
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
To even attempt to bring 101 Dalmatians to the stage is in itself a big achievement, as the story is a complex one with many different scenes, plus of course the problem of how you deal with the dogs, and there the options are limited – live animals, actors dressed as animals, animation, or puppets (or a combination of all of these). Over the course of various stage productions of 101 Dalmatians different methods have been tried, and this one has taken the puppet approach, similar to the one that has proved so successful on stage for “War Horse” or “The Lion King”.
In this production, there is no doubt about the care that has been taken to create these puppets, or the skills of bringing them to life on stage. Here of course, as this is a musical, the main puppet handlers have to be able to sing too and the dogs have very different songs from each other to give them individuality. The dogs also have a different style of song to separate them from their humans as this story, as per the original, is really seen from the dogs’ point of view. Creating new and memorable stage songs for humans is difficult enough, but for puppet dogs even more difficult, and composer Douglas Hodge has overall done a fine job of giving us all a mixture of classic and contemporary sounding songs for this show.
The big problem for me is the production and script overall, as I was never sure tonight where the target audience was. A lot of those issues for me came from this updated take on Cruella De Vil (performed tonight by Rachel Lea-Gray and not Fay Tozer) and her two incompetent assistants Casper (Charles Brunton) and Jasper (Danny Hendrix), who are all straight out of the classic pantomime mould of characters and sadly, with this show being on stage so close to Christmas, it so often had that feel of a pantomime about it and I was just waiting for someone to shout “Behind You” for much of the evening.
Cruella De Vil is such an iconic character that it seemed odd to not play heavily upon her many strengths and in this case make her little more than someone who was a heartless killer. Cruella still gets a few good songs though, “Animal Lover” being one of them. Some scenes with Cruella just seem to break the narrative rather than move it forward in any way too. A reminder to Cruella – do not run your big knife (looking such an obviously fake one), down the side of dog cages that are supposed to be electrified. Rachel Lea-Gray does her best with these songs, but there is little that she can do with some of the dialogue.
As always, the dogs’ humans have little to do here, but here they are enjoyable to watch and Danielle (Jessie Elland) always adds some depth to a character that can never really be in the spotlight.
To be fair to this show, there are a few scenes of genuine tenderness and emotion around these dogs, and the puppet handlers manage them well. There are moments too where the dialogue and the music for the dogs works very well. There were a lot of children in the seats around me this evening and all too often they did not seem to be engaging with this show in the way that I expected them to and the bulk of the applause was coming from adults for some of the show songs. Maybe 21st century children are too used to CGI graphics on their own mobile (or other) screens these days?
Review by Tom King © 2024
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com