For a show about fun, Big provides disappointingly little of it. This is a starry but insipid revival of the 1996 wish-fulfilment musical, based on the hit 80s body-swap movie that mis-sold a generation the idea that growing up meant turning into Tom Hanks. For all its additional dance breaks, this soulless show feels both flatter and more uptight than its source material.
Jay McGuiness (formerly of the Wanted, perhaps best known for that jive on Strictly) brings a wide-eyed wonder to the role of Josh Baskin, a child who feels invisibile until he is granted his wish to be big. Gawky in his new body, he quickly falls into fortune when the boss of a toy company (a growling Matthew Kelly) is drawn to his refreshingly playful attitude. Job sorted, he soon finds love with Girls Aloud’s Kimberley Walsh as Susan Lawrence, a workaholic who long ago suffocated her inner child.
Josh’s firecracker best friend Billy (Jobe Hart) is a scene-stealer. McGuiness and Walsh are a neat pairing with panto-style chemistry, but the songs by David Shire and Richard Maltby Jr hardly bounce out of the theatre, and it’s a shame Walsh’s lines rarely take her away from the topic of men. It isn’t always useful to unpick the problematic plotlines of revivals, but surely shows should justify their place on stage, regardless of age. And while this romcom attempts to wash over the murky sexual politics with a jokey aside, it feels naive not to grapple with the fact that it is the story of a 13-year-old boy in a sexual relationship with a thirtysomething woman; the adult body does not cancel out the child’s mind.
Photograph: Alastair Muir
Doing much of the aesthetic heavy-lifting, a huge rotating screen feels closer to cheating than innovation. Around it, the stage is lined with the New York skyline arranged like broken piano keys, a nod to the famous floor-piano scene in which Josh and his boss play Heart and Soul. Even this scene is dampened, with a prerecorded lit-up keyboard and some out-of-time leaping ridding the scene of thrill and risk. As Josh says in his toy department’s product analysis meetings: what’s fun about that?
At the Dominion theatre, London, until 2 November.
• This article was amended on 19 September to correct the spelling of Jobe Hart’s name.
