More magical than the film, this Frozen’s one hot hit
FROZEN was the Disney movie that launched a thousand earworms – as parents around the world will attest. Let It Go, Do You Want To Build A Snowman and other anthems ran on a continuous loop in the heads of hapless mums and dads, sometimes for years, depending on the size of your brood.
But whatever we grown-ups may think of those songs, you’ve got to take your bobble hat off to Michael Grandage’s amazing blizzard of a staging – which finally made its West End debut last night.
It’s an ice storm of a show featuring (literally) breathtaking magic and mesmerising meteorological effects in Christopher Oram’s stunning stage design that rivals the animation of the film and adds a whole new wow of its own.
The production is as much a replica of the movie as gravity and other laws of physics will allow. But its defining features are its magic and its spectacle.
The fairy tale castle in the imaginary Nordic land of Arendelle has stained-glass windows opening on to panoramic mountains struck alternately by the Northern Lights and 3D projections of swirling snowstorms – not to mention an incredible 70ft ice bridge that later rolls across the stage.
Our heroine Elsa (Samantha Barks), who is cursed by an anti-Midas touch that turns everything to ice, sees her cloak fly from her back and snowflakes leap from her fingers.
But when her dress changes in a flash to a pale blue sequined gown, as she conjures up her ice palace refuge all alone, she was almost sucked from the stage by a collective gasp from the audience – acknowledged by Barks with a cheekily satisfied grin.
The heart of the story, though, belongs to Stephanie McKeon as Elsa’s devoted sister Anna.
She’s a saucer-eyed delight and a reckless innocent as she goes on her mountain odyssey to persuade her sister to reverse the spell that accidentally locked the kingdom into an everlasting winter.
Both sing lustily, but Barks’s Elsa is like Amanda Holden with booster rockets, blasting off impressively with one of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez’s new numbers, Dangerous To Dream.
McKeon has more fun with doting suitor Hans in a cartwheeling rendition of Love Is An Open Door (a particular former bugbear of mine). And as Hans, Oliver Ormson makes one of the most marvellously camp entrances I’ve ever witchange nessed in the West End – cantering on with his floppy fringe bouncing on the breeze.
The film’s best characters sparkle on stage; with some of them given a little extra stardust. Craig Gallivan, who works the puppet snowman Olaf, makes him a goofy crowdpleaser: A cheerful idiot with all the best lines.
MY only slight misgiving is that Kristoff is no longer the biddable toyboy of the film. In the form of Obioma Ugoala he’s become a cuddly but older and more ponderous saviour, saddled with a sappy (even for Disney) new refrain, What Do You Know About Love? The movie’s big scary ice monster has been axed; and the trolls who roll up as moss-covered rocks are now more like dreadlocked fauns from Narnia, spouting mumbo jumbo spells. One that does go down like a shot of Aquavit, though, is Jak Skelly’s reworked shopkeeper Oaken, who has a congaline of nudists bathing in his sauna hut.
This cues a deliciously dotty dance sequence that, together with Skelly’s cod Scandinavian accent, feels like Benny Hill circa 1975.
That doesn’t mean Frozen’s lost its innocence, though. And it’s surely an upgrade on the film’s somewhat prim sisterhood values.
Grandage’s show has a life force all its own, and looks capable of running for a very long time.
And by the way, some outre ‘Post-Pre-Raphaelite’ paintings of scenes from Shakespeare aside, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s £60million makeover of the building is sumptuous. Go just for coffee in the garden conservatory!