Sublimely witty and surprisingly profound, it’s a pleasure to experience this new, improved musical version of Groundhog Day again. Based by Danny Rubin on his script for the 1993 Bill Murray film about an arrogant American weatherman endlessly reliving the same day, it has music and lyrics from Tim Minchin and direction by Matthew Warchus, two-thirds of the dream team that made Matilda a smash.
If this show doesn’t quite escape the shadow of its source material, it adds dimension and depth to it. Groundhog Day makes perfect sense as a stage musical, a form where actions are repeated with variation in the hope of perfection. And of course, it’s fitting that Broadway actor Andy Karl is back in the role of Phil Connors at the Old Vic, where he and the show won rave reviews in 2016, only for the subsequent New York run to be cut short, and for the anticipated West End transfer to evaporate. Better luck this time, eh?
Karl is well cast as Connors: smooth, cynical, with a hint of Patrick Bateman psychosis under the surface. Dispatched with novice producer Rita (Tanisha Spring) to smalltown Punxsutawny, Pennsylvania, where a groundhog predicts the weather every February 2nd, Phil puts the moves on anyone female and sneers at everything else.
Subsequently condemned to repeat the same 24-hour cycle again and again, he moves through states of confusion, exultation, despair and finally acceptance. In the film Phil learns to stop wooing Rita and love his fellow man. Here, he makes a sort of cosmic peace with the fact that life is everything and nothing.
Ignorance of the movie might actually be bliss. Those like me who have watched it (naturally) multiple times will have a mental checklist of scenarios and jokes. The creative team here tick off almost all of them and add more. There’s a deliriously inventive car chase, an exuberant tapdance routine and a song where we watch Phil repeatedly end his own life only to pop up each time on another part of the stage.
Minchin and Rubin fill in the backstories of Rita, Phil’s old schoolmate Ned Ryerson, and also the local girl he sets out to seduce when he realises he has endless chances. Her number, Being Nancy, is dazzlingly meta, also exploring the feelings of the actress playing the role. Minchin riffles expertly through musical genres – the hillbilly-style Nobody Cares goes straight into the pantheon of drunk songs – and his lyrics are just ravishing. I can’t think of another composer who’d work an enema into a moment of existential crisis, as it were.
Rob Howell’s set – snow flurries, skylines, a weather map and Phil’s recurring bedroom – have been simplified. Warchus handles the script’s subtly layered repetitions with aplomb. Karl doesn’t have one of those huge Broadway voices but he is nicely, sardonically terse early on, and sweetly melodious when Phil mellows. Spring has a lovely, bell-like voice and her charming Rita has a bit of grit. I rarely want to see a production more than once. I’d happily watch this one a third time. Maybe a fourth, a fifth…
