99 YEARS OLD AND STILL DIFFERENT EVERY DAY...

WHEN I first saw the 1993 film Groundhog Day, I felt intense sympathy for the character played by Bill Murray who finds himself reliving the same day again and again and again. And again. And again.

Just imagine, I thought, having to read the same Beachcomber column every day. Most of them, of course, are well worth re-reading, but to do so incessantly must become irritating after the first few hundred times.

When I first saw the 1993 film Groundhog Day, I felt intense… oh, sorry, I don’t know what came over me. What I meant to say was when I first saw the 2016 musical Groundhog Day at the Old Vic last week, I was amazed. Books have often been successfully turned into musicals; musicals have often been successfully turned into films; but turning a classic comedy film into a musical is not, I would have thought, a recipe for success. It would, I felt sure, have been a mistake for Bill Murray to burst into song in the film, as music tends to slow down the quickfire action on which the idea depends.

I was wrong. The musical version of Groundhog Day is, if anything, even better and funnier than the film and Andy Karl, in the Bill Murray role, gives a performance as full of manic energy and fabulous humour as anything I’ve ever seen on stage. His singing, dancing, comic timing and infuriation at his enforced madcap repetition add up to a glorious treat that fully deserved the full-house standing ovation he received at the end. And on a Thursday night, two weeks into the run, this is no mean achievement.

With very slick direction by Matthew Warchus, music and lyrics by the brilliant Tim Minchin, and a script by Danny Rubin, who co-wrote the original Groundhog Day film, the musical succeeds in building on the ideas of the film in very funny and effective ways, making even more of the philosophical problems of endless repetition that the film managed.

In the first half, we see the Karl/ Murray character move from perplexity to frustration to a realisation of the opportunities the situation offers, all of which leads to utter boredom and desperation. In the second half, however, he begins to change and do things to help others rather than taking advantage of them. It’s a nicely uplifting idea but seems almost a throwaway afterthought in the film and a means of bringing it to a tidy conclusion. The musical gives it all deeper meaning without pausing in the manic pace of the whole thing.

Change, the Dalai Lama tells us, must come from within but he probably never thought to apply that to the idea of changing from one day to the next and use it as the basis for a comedy musical.

If I were doomed to relive the same day over and over again, I would try to insist that it was a day when I had tickets to see this show. I am sure it would take a very long time before I grew at all bored with it. And if that happened, I’m sure I could swap the tickets and go to see Book Of Mormon instead... before going back to Groundhog Day next time.