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I’LL START, if I may, by addressing fervent fans of the film — of which I am one — and assure them this new musical version is even better. For them, at least, this should give some measure of the achievement of Matthew Warchus’s production.
For everyone else, was the fantastically witty 1993 movie whose hero — a cynical TV weatherman — is stuck in small-town America because he has been caught up in a repeating time-loop — if time-loops are a thing and can be repeated.
To this funny and unexpectedly thought-provoking plot, which manages to reveal that we are all to some extent trapped by our character flaws and foibles, composer/lyricist Tim Minchin has written a score every bit as good as the one he created for the musical
Also crucial is the casting of American Andy Karl who, as Phil the weatherman, delivers one of the most commanding musical comedy performances I have seen. In fact, Karl is so good that not for a second do you miss Bill Murray who played Phil in the movie.
Tall, dark and with the kind of conventional good looks that could grace a knitwear catalogue, not a nanosecond of Karl’s performance goes by without him extracting every scintilla of comedy and drama made available to him by Danny Rubin’s well crafted script. Equally witty are Minchin’s songs, the first of which sees Phil bemoan small-town America — a kind of civic version of Randy Newman’s
So smooth you could ski down him, Phil is also deeply shallow and a fantastically selfish, nasty piece of work. His first instinct is to get out of the town he has been sent to because he thinks he’s too good for it. You can’t blame him. He’s there to report on a “moronic” tradition that sees a large rodent deified by the townspeople for its weather-prediction skills. When he realises he’s trapped there and that his every action has no consequence, his second instinct is to have sex with all the women, including his producer Rita (Carlyss Peer), steal money and crash cars until the futility of it all leads him to a series of successful suicides. But even death ends up with him waking in the same chintzy B&B, on the same repeating morning. The stage-craft with which this is achieved is so brilliantly executed I burst into spontaneous applause. One moment, Karl’s Phil has topped himself at one end of the stage, the next he is rising out of bed for more self-harm at the other end. There’s more darkness in the form of some beautifully observed songs that bring real depth to bit-part characters. If there’s a minus to be found, maybe it’s that Warchus stirs the emotions more than moves them. But then the same could have been said of the movie. There’s no doubt about it. I could sit through this show again, and again and again.
EVERYTHING I remember about school outings is about the journey — jostling for coach seats, sweaty egg-mayonnaise sandwiches — rather than the destination. After seeing this raucous and joyous show, that relates the hap and mishap of six girl choristers from a fictional Catholic school who head to Edinburgh to take part in a choir competition, I’ll think of my school outings as embarrassingly uneventful and a wasted opportunity.
Instead of egg sandwiches, the rampaging students from Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour — here also known as “the virgin megastore” — are packing flasks laced with vodka, and also a determination to “go mental” in the city’s dives. They ditch their uniforms, blag their way into clubs with the intention of copping off with sailors on leave, and sing — really well. The harmonic virtuosity used to perform Mendelssohn is deployed to equally stunning effect for ELO’s songbook.
Without that musical dimension, this adaptation by Lee Hall would have tired during the last third of this uninterrupted show. But, with it, Vicky Featherstone’s production, first seen in Edinburgh, is never less than a soaring hymn to adolescent — though not innocent — spirit.
Most surprising of all is not the music, but the versatility of the acting. Everyone here occasionally morphs into the often boneheaded men the girls encounter. Hall’s framing device — the girls have turned the trip into a stage act in one of the dodgy clubs — bears little scrutiny. But the sheer lifeaffirming spirit of this gang carries all before it.