Groundhog Day
Music and lyrics: Tim Minchin Book: Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis Director: Matthew Warchus
The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 (0844-871 7628) Until 17 September Running time: 2hrs 35mins (including interval)
★★★★
“Something extraordinary has happened at The Old Vic,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. A much-loved, funny and clever Hollywood film has been triumphantly reinvented as a musical. Composer Tim Minchin and director Matthew Warchus – the team behind the smash-hit musical Matilda – have pulled it off with such flair, the result looks “equal to, and perhaps better than, the movie”.
For those unacquainted with the film, said Paul Taylor in The Independent, its plot is a Scrooge-like fable involving a cynical TV weatherman called Phil (played in the 1993 movie by Bill Murray) who – to his vast irritation – is dispatched to the small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to report on its annual Groundhog Day festival, only to find that as long as he refuses to take joy in the event, he is doomed to relive the day over and over again. Not the kind of story, you’d think, that would work well on the stage. But you’d be wrong: in Warchus’s superb production, the inhabitants of Punxsutawney dash around on travelators and interlocking revolving stages as they continually dismantle and reconstruct the weatherman’s world. It’s a “miracle of stagecraft and technical coordination”. And Minchin’s score is “as smart as Warchus’s staging is witty”, said Matt Trueman in Variety. The real genius of this stage version however, is the way it “cracks open” the film’s plot “to reveal the philosophies spinning beneath its surface”. What seemed, on screen, like a slight fable of a grumpy man “stuck in a time-loop” starts to look like “a wise old classic”. This one will “run and run. And run.”
“Who knew that déjà vu could smell this fresh all over again?” asked Ben Brantley in The New York Times. This “bright whirligig” of a show is “cool (as in hip) and warm (as in cuddly)”. It is spiky and sentimental at the same time, and I grinned pretty much the whole way through. Broadway star Andy Karl is superb as Phil, said Ann Treneman in The Times. He’s just as arrogant as Bill Murray, but younger and fitter, and plays the part with more swagger. In sum, this is a fabulous evening: funny, frantic and very touching.