Review: NUTCRACKER! THE MUSICAL, Pleasance Theatre, December 9 2015

It is, perhaps, useful to be reminded of just how difficult musical theatre is to deliver and how many ingredients have to be just right for its strange alchemy to spin gold from the raw materials of script, music, cast, musicians and creatives. And Nutcracker! The Musical (continuing at the Pleasance Theatre until 3 January) certainly does remind us of this fact since, despite many good ideas along the way, as a whole, it just doesn't work.

Its conception is fine: go back to Hoffmann's original story of the Prince transformed into a Nutcracker doll by an evil Mouse Queen as the basis of the book and use Tchaikovsky's timeless tunes set to new lyrics for the score. When it works (as in Leigh Rhianon Coggins's Sugar Plum Fairy song introducing Marie to the Toys' World) one glimpses some of the magic of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. When it doesn't work, it really doesn't, because Tchaikovsky wrote for ballet and not voices, so the songs are very hard to sing and often feel a little forced. Gallons of talent and confidence are needed to perform in this show and, unfortunately, it comes up short at the moment.

That said, the two main problems that stop the show reaching its potential are structural.

The Pleasance Theatre is a big space for a fringe venue with room for 300 or more in the house, hence it needs singers who can either project some forty yards or so or gain the benefit of body mics and amplification. With some honourable exceptions (Jamie Birkett does a good turn as a dying Mouse Queen - though it is a little overdone - and Maria Coyne's voice is certainly up to the challenge) too often lyrics and even spoken words are simply inaudible. Alas, we never care enough about the characters because we never really get to know them.

The second issue that is not resolved concerns tone - is this a pantomime or a play with music? At times, we're in full panto mode with the fourth wall broken and lots of overacting and general silliness. But, just as you settle into the panto spirit, twenty minutes of light musical theatre turns up and we're lost again. This confusion over identity is at its most acute in the dance scenes in which some of the cast appear capable dancing ballet steps and some definitely not. If it's panto, we laugh at the cloggers - but it's not panto (or is it) - and what about the couples pas de deuxing perfectly well?

There's time in the run to sort some of these matters out (and the delay to the start to press night might suggest that the director Ollie Fielding is doing so) but what we have at the moment feels like a work-in-progress rather than a fully realised piece of theatre.

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