“Is this bear an endangered species?” asks Tarinn Callender as the hapless helper of Victoria Hamilton-Barritt’s (very) arch-villainess Millicent Price. With growling glee as insanely delicious as it is malicious, she retorts, “It is now.” Price is absolutely right about the trapped-in-peril titular character she wants to stuff, but about the show as a whole she couldn’t be more wrong. Furry, funny and fully-formed, the much-anticipated “Paddington” musical has finally arrived in the West End and it’s alive not only with joy but that vanishingly rare theatrical quality: completely beguiling charm.
Adapting beloved intellectual property to the stage is a risky business. For every long-running “The Lion King” and “Wicked” there’s an “Interview With A Vampire”, “Groundhog Day” or London’s current, depressingly flaccid “The Hunger Games.” But hopes were lifted for producers Sonia Friedman and Eliza Lumley’s stage presentation by the fact that the film versions of Michael Bond’s original 1958 story collection “A Bear Called Paddington” (and fourteen sequels) were vastly stronger than anyone foresaw, amassing a box-office total approaching $800 million and counting.
At least five years in gestation with multiple developmental workshops along the way, the result could have felt flatly cynical. But from the opening moments, set in the cozy cabinet of curiosities shop — cue orchestrator/arranger Matt Brind’s mysterious and twinkling Danny Elfman-esque underscoring — there’s real precision to Luke Sheppard’s production. From the storybook design right through the entire cast, the show never feels engineered.
The overriding question prior to opening was: How would they do the bear? The answer sounds more complicated than it appears but Paddington is played by Arti Shah, an actor of short stature, inside an expectedly furry costume while being voiced and (powerfully) sung by another actor, James Hameed, who appears briefly to bookend the show but spends the rest of his time backstage. Like the central character in the stage adaptation of “War Horse,” what is in effect a human-operated puppet works immediately on the audience’s collective imagination. And like the doleful dog in the Aardman Animations “Wallace and Gromit” screen hits, the bear’s seemingly expressionless face with jet-black eyes turns out to be astonishingly expressive, not least because of Hameed’s voice and the sympathetic head and body movements.
With that problem winningly solved, it becomes a question as to whether the material works both as a piece of theatrical storytelling and as a musical.
The initially buoyant company number “I’ve Arrived” sets the pleasingly jaunty tone, aided and abetted by Ellen Kane’s snappy, characterful, happily theatrical choreography, which sends crowds of passengers skittering across Tom Pye’s atmospheric set of the London train station rendered even more famous than J.K. Rowling’s King’s Cross. (A statue of Paddington Bear was unveiled at the real Paddington Station in 2000, long before the movies.)
Music and lyrics are by Tom Fletcher, founder of the wildly successful British band McFly. But Fletcher has also written over 30 children’s books, so this is not a world he’s condescending to. Interleaved with Jessica Swale’s neat book, numbers and moments occasionally overplay their hand when underlining teachable moments, but the performers carry the valuable sentiment so securly that it almost never curdles into sentimentality.
Fletcher’s music and lyrics are mostly more effective than fully affecting and are better at delivering states of mind than moving plot forward. But his comedy numbers are witty and, seized by the skilled cast, all the laughs land. And in an era where musicals too often topple over into high seriousness, the return of musical comedy is lapped up by the audience, nowhere more so than in one of the show’s highpoints, the Act Two opener.
A superbly silly comedy waltz in which Millicent’s increasingly unhappy sidekick Mr. Curry (Tom Edden, the scene-stealing waiter from “One Man, Two Guvnors”) is seduced into a love of Paddington’s favorite food, “Marmalade” turns into a riotously infectious and orange production number which even has the nerve to get the audience to join in, which, at the press performance, they exuberantly did. Edden and Sheppard’s superbly meshed production team turn the number into a music-and-design tour-de-force with costume designer Gabriella Slade going for broke against Ash J. Woodward’s wonderful, picture-book-style animation. Eschewing dull literalism, the bold illustrations lend imaginative flair to the warm, lived-in look of Pye’s production design.
Swale’s book allows every character their season in the spotlight and Adrian Der Gregorian’s Mr. Brown has a nice line in fatherly exasperation and stymied hope. As Mrs. Brown, Amy Ellen Richardson has a tremendous singing voice with a real belt where necessary, and the tenderness of her performance is responsible for the show’s unusual degree of truthful sincerity.
Where director Sheppard (“& Juliet”) and Swale score most strongly is in their own inventions away from the film. Hamilton-Barritt has had a career being the best thing in high-profile flops including the National Theatre’s “Hex” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cinderella.” Here, in a grotesque characterization in tweeds and thigh-length boots, she’s finally surfing on a hit, ricocheting gloriously between wickedly basso-profundo, deadpan droll and, to the audience’s delight, lip-smacking savagery.
If she’s now the shoo-in for next year’s Best Leading Actress awards, all Best Supporting Actress prizes are going to be stolen by Amy Booth-Steel who wrings every conceivable laugh from — and adds a heap of her own to — a string of minor characters. Whether she’s slaying her lines as a pert and sarcastic station announcer or inhabiting the galumphing, self-aggrandizing, gloriously vowel-mangling president of the Geographical Guild, there’s not a speck of the auditorium she doesn’t rule.
Author Michael Bond created a character with a label saying “Please look after this bear.” It’s a pretty safe bet that West End audiences will look after “Paddington” for a long time to come.
variety.com
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