Review: SINGIN' IN THE RAIN at Le Théâtre Du Lido

There is something almost inevitable about Singin' in the Rain landing at the Théâtre du Lido. Since December 2022, when Jean-Luc Choplin relaunched the former cabaret as a venue devoted principally to musical theatre, the Lido has been negotiating a peculiar identity: no longer a dinner-show cabaret, but a theatre whose architecture, machinery and audience configuration still belong unmistakably to its past. Cabaret, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Rocky Horror Show and Hello, Dolly! have each explored that new identity to varying degrees, but Robert Carsen's Singin' in the Rain is the production that makes the transformation feel completely seamless.

This is a venue built as a cabaret, complete with the kind of stage machinery — a genuine rising stage among it — that most book musicals never get within reach of, and Carsen's staging uses virtually every inch of it. The cabaret feeling never tips into gimmickry because it is not something artificially imposed on the musical: it grows organically out of the room itself. Even Hello, Dolly!, which ran at the Lido from November 2024 to March 2025 and was a substantial achievement under Stephen Mear, remained more conventionally staged, despite Peter McKintosh's handsome sets and Mear's energetic choreography. Singin' in the Rain goes further, making the auditorium, the machinery and the space between stage and audience part of the dramatic vocabulary. Of all the productions mounted at the Lido since its conversion to a musical-theatre venue, this is the one that most convincingly demonstrates what the building can actually do — and, in that sense, it is the best production the new Lido has presented so far.

The stage musical has had a long and slightly uneven life getting to this point. Tommy Steele directed and starred in the original 1983 London Palladium production; a National Theatre revival in 2000, directed by Jude Kelly and choreographed by Stephen Mear, won the Olivier for Best Musical Revival; Jonathan Church's 2011 Chichester Festival Theatre staging, with Adam Cooper and choreography by Andrew Wright, transferred to the West End's Palace Theatre in 2012. Carsen himself first tackled the title in 2015, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, again with Mear choreographing. This Lido production is, in effect, his second attempt at the same material eleven years on, and he has rebuilt the creative team almost entirely: Rebecca Howell, a choreographer whose long list of associate credits (Moulin Rouge! on Broadway and in the West End, American Psycho, Funny Girl, a Châtelet My Fair Lady) has clearly prepared her to lead, takes over the dance floor, while sets and costumes go to Luis F. Carvalho, Carsen's regular collaborator across a string of opera productions from La Scala to the Paris Opera — and, tellingly, the designer of the Lido's own recent staging of Cabaret. Carvalho therefore arrives already fluent in what this particular stage can do.

That familiarity shows. Of every stage version of this story, this is the one that finally feels as though it has found the right home — sharper and more fully realised than the Chichester production or even Carsen's own Châtelet outing, both of which came close without quite closing the gap between film and stage. Here, the Lido's inherited cabaret vocabulary becomes an advantage rather than an obstacle: the proximity of the audience, the unusually deep stage, the mechanical possibilities and the sense that the performance can spill beyond the conventional proscenium all suit a musical whose very subject is spectacle. The one place the production slightly overreaches is Finn Ross's video design. The movie-within-the-movie sequences, shot on location at the Château de Versailles, are lavish and clearly expensive, but there is a little too much of them, and the show is at its best when it trusts its own stage rather than cutting away to the screen above it.

It helps that the cast could hardly be stronger. Ashley Day's Don Lockwood has nothing to envy in Gene Kelly — a performer whose CV already runs through An American in Paris, 42nd Street and The Book of Mormon in the West End, Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl at the Théâtre Marigny, and Anatole in a Shanghai production of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 — and he carries the role's dancing, singing and easy comic charm with equal confidence. Maddie Waller, a 2024 Laine Theatre Arts graduate who was once the standby for this very role on a touring production in China, makes Kathy Selden's Paris debut count. Charlie Waddell's Cosmo brings the same warm comic engine that served him in Sunset Boulevard at the Savoy and South Pacific at Chichester, while Natasha O'Brien's Lina Lamont — fresh off Mamma Mia! in the West End and international tour — finds real, cackling specificity in a role that can easily become one-note. Julius D'Silva, whose credits stretch from the Royal Shakespeare Company to & Juliet in the West End, rounds out the leads as studio boss R.F. Simpson.

The choreography honours Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's original film work with a string of visual nods rather than a straight copy, and its single biggest swing is an expanded Broadway Ballet, given over almost entirely to a terrific ensemble tap sequence that earns every one of its extra minutes. The one absence, inevitably, is Cyd Charisse's sultry gangster's-moll sequence from that same number — but no stage production of this title has ever attempted it, so its absence here is convention rather than a shortfall. Luis F. Carvalho's costumes, some 240 of them by the production's own count, are genuinely lavish, doing as much to place the show in its late-1920s Hollywood setting as anything on stage.

Structurally, the show runs a little unevenly: the first act, compared to the film's brisker momentum, drags in places, while the second act is comparatively short — though it more than makes up the difference with an exhilarating full-company encore that sends the audience out on the highest possible note. Nothing tops the final scene, though, staged with the "movie" now happening live in the theatre around the audience itself. It is an unforced, quietly audacious piece of immersive staging that turns the audience into eyewitnesses rather than spectators, and by the time the lights come up, more than a few people around the room are visibly moved to tears.

That ending also explains why the Lido, rather than a conventional theatre, turns out to be such a good home for Singin' in the Rain. The building spent decades teaching audiences to expect spectacle at close quarters, and its transformation into a musical-theatre venue has not erased that history so much as repurposed it. Hello, Dolly! demonstrated that a classic Broadway musical could flourish here; Singin' in the Rain goes further by making the old cabaret architecture part of the storytelling itself. The result is not a musical awkwardly occupying a former cabaret, but a production that makes the two traditions seem to have been waiting for each other.

It is not a flawless evening — the first act could move faster, the screen could show rather less — but as a piece of stagecraft, this is Singin' in the Rain finally working the way its stage adaptors have always wanted it to. More importantly, it is the production that makes the Lido's unusual second life as a musical-theatre venue feel fully justified. Gene Kelly would, one suspects, approve.

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