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I’ve got no desire to cock a snook – or a leg – at those who want to entertain families and make a few bob during the school holidays. But this puppet-led musical adaptation of Dodie Smith’s much-loved story has become seriously mangy since it premiered at Regent’s Park in 2022. Back then I was howling my approval: last night I was whining to be let out.
It’s broadly the same show, with music and lyrics by Douglas Hodge and a book by Johnny McKnight, based on an earlier stage adaptation by Zinnie Harris: but the tone has changed. Where there was wry visual invention and sly humour there is now twee mawkishness. As one of the dogs puts it later, we’re in a place “where people talk to us in stupid, high-pitched baby voices”.
Part of the problem is scale. This staging by Bill Buckhurst is a version of his touring production in which props and sets have been pared back and the puppets simplified. The original adult Dalmatians in 2022, created by Toby Olié of War Horse fame, had two operators each: the new ones by Jimmy Grimes have one.
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In the 3,655 seat Eventim Apollo the show looks horribly exposed and feeble. This Art Deco former cinema and long-standing concert venue is gorgeous but entirely unsuited to theatre. It’s where the likes of Sister Act, Shrek and now Smith’s Dalmatians come to die.
The adaptation draws inspiration from Disney’s 1961 film as well as the 1956 novel but updates the action to the present day. This means there are lots of tedious but necessary mentions of microchipping, and a horrible moment when Boris Johnson pops up in a cockney pub song celebrating criminality.
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It starts off cheerfully enough, though, with good-hearted dogs’ home worker Danielle adopting abandoned damaged stray Pongo. On a walk in Primrose Hill they get entangled with nerdy fashion designer Tom and his spotty bitch Perdita. Love flourishes for dogs and owners after a bout of bottom-sniffing (by dogs, not owners). Soon Perdita has popped out 15 pups.
Perdita’s pregnancy captures the imagination of fashion maven Cruella De Vil, who has a thing for animal skin and who is played with more volume than subtlety by Britain’s Got Talent winner Sydnie Christmas. She craves a one-off pooch-pelt coat and entrusts her dimwit nephews Casper and Jasper (Jeff Brazier and Aston Merrygold, both paying the mortgage) to get it.
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The first half is at least brisk, with six songs, including the mournful, Celtic-influenced opener Take Me Home. The second descends into effortful slapstick and panto gags as the baddies kidnap the pups and imprison them with 93 others, ready for Cruella’s flensing knife. Cruella complains that an escaped puppy could have made “a shoe”. “Bless you!” ripostes Merrygold’s Jasper. Arf, arf.
The great escape is laborious. The story’s pivotal car chase is slackly staged. The last original song, before a battery of reprises, is the emetic A Thousand Kisses, in which Perdita tries to breathe life back into one of her freezing pups. I hated this first time round and here it’s milked beyond human or canine endurance.
The cast members who articulate and voice the anthropomorphic dog puppets are mostly able (I won’t say which one was jarringly flat). There’s a shadow of the original pedigree product here, but this is a dogs’ dinner.
101 Dalmatians The Musical, until August 30, tickets and information here.
