Tale about daring to be different fails to break the mould
The Boy In The Dress Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon ★★☆☆☆☆
THIS new musical is scored by Robbie Williams and his longtime collaborator Guy Chambers. David Walliams wrote the book (adapted by Mark Ravenhill) and it is produced and directed by the RSC, whose production of Matilda remains a global hit.
You would think, with a creative team like that, this would be another global hit. But the result feels like a rehashed version of past – and mostly other people’s – successes.
The hero is 12-year-old Dennis (on press night, the excellent Toby Mocrei), top scorer of the school football team who knows he is different but isn’t sure why. The penny drops in the corner shop, run by the somewhat off-theshelf Raj (Irvine Iqbal), where Dennis sees a copy of Vogue. That spark ignites a desire for female fashion shared by the school’s prettiest student Lisa (Tabitha Knowles, who sings beautifully). And so Dennis wears one of Lisa’s dresses to school, with predictable results.
But musical theatre is not short of shows about boys who want to break free of working class masculinity. This one has a dad who hates that idea (like Billy Elliot), a boy who yearns to ditch his school uniform for something gorgeous (Everybody’s Talking About Jamie) and a cruel school head who hates children (the RSC’s own, much superior Matilda). This feels like an inferior version of all three.
Williams and Chambers’s score only fleetingly generates the kind of energy that makes their chart music irresistible. It happens with the raggainfused A Girl Who’s Gonna Be, which sees Dennis in his dress initiated into the school’s girl gang. It is not the intended show-stopper in Gregory Doran’s by-the-numbers production, but it is exhilaratingly sung and in harmony so sharp it cuts the air.
Yet the overwhelming sense here is of a well-meaning show created by people who think they are leading the way in telling children that it is OK to be different. But the truth is, they are just following the curve.