This turbo-charged revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jeremy Sams’ musical adaptation serves up a hybrid theatre-cum-cinema experience. The proscenium arch is reframed as a luminous screen and the production pays clear homage to the 1939 film. But nostalgic imagery of rural Kansas is spliced with a futuristic world and we are taken to an Oz that is big, kitsch and unfamiliar.
Directed by Nikolai Foster, the adventures of Dorothy and her friends seem reconceived as a Steven Spielberg-style action movie, the back screen resembling a VR game. We slalom down the Yellow Brick Road and into Emerald City, which looks like New York’s Times Square with a green wash.
