Well, that was exhausting. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of the iconic 1939 musical film fantasy is a relentlessly professional piece of entertainment, with the feelgood sentiment bolted on. Georgina Onuorah’s full-throated, tough-cookie Dorothy yomps through a steampunk 1950s version of Oz that also has overtones of contemporary late-stage capitalism, mostly created through back projection and garish costumes.
Shay Barclay’s choreography has a martial air, the cast gunning us into submission with their rictus grins and front-stage flick-flacks. There’s not much space for characterisation or vulnerability among the leads. It all feels a bit hollow beneath the shiny exterior, like the Tin Man’s chest cavity. But, as I said of Lloyd Webber’s Joseph also at the Palladium before Covid: resistance is useless.
Lloyd Webber wrote this show in 2011, adapting the story with Jeremy Sams and adding new songs with lyrics by Tim Rice. They’re no match for Over the Rainbow or Off to See the Wizard, but are largely inoffensive. Nikolai Foster’s revival started in Leicester with Unuorah – who won an Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation Scholarship at drama school and has utterly justified his faith in her since graduating in 2020 - in the lead.
Her sidekicks have been recast for the West End according to some algorithm of bankability. So we get Ashley Banjo of BGT winners Diversity as a charming, body-popping Tin Man and comedian Jason Manford riffing knowingly on Bert Lahr’s film performance as the Cowardly Lion. Big-voiced stalwarts Christina Bianco and Dianne Pilkington unleash the decibels as the good and bad witches to satisfy the musical-theatre purists. And let’s hear it for the ever-dependable Gary Wilmot who turns up, breezes through the role of the Wizard and, I hope, banks a cheque commensurate to the lifestyle he deserves.
It would be absurd to complain about liberties taken with the story. L Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book was first adapted for the stage in 1902 and he wrote 13 sequels: there were three silent films before the iconic 1939 iteration, not to mention later retoolings like The Wiz in the 1970s. Nonetheless, you wish Foster and his team would pick a style and stick to it. The Kansas from which Dorothy is wrenched by a cyclone is influenced by Grant Wood’s American Gothic and the dustbowl Depression imagery of Dorothea Lange.
Oz looks like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but up close it’s full of signs for fast food outlets called Ozdonalds and Ozbucks, and another for “Baum’s Burlesque”. The Wicked Witch of the West (Pilkington) fronts a dastardly online corporation and her flying monkeys are Hell’s Angels. Bianco’s good witch Glinda rides a Barbiecore moped.
None of it makes sense. But that was never the strong suit of Baum’s book, or the film, which are both basic and striking enough to allow for endless interpretation. And in this time of stupid culture wars it’s good to see a ruthlessly commercial adaption of the story which is also inclusive. And which, so close to Pride, acknowledges what Dorothy’s rainbow came to mean to a whole host of her friends.
