Snoopy! The Musical is a dog. Or rather it's a puppy that keeps jumping up and licking your face, and trying to get you to like it with its jaunty tunes and little nuggets of homespun philosophy delivered by undersized young actors dressed up as freckle-faced children. It is so bouncy, so full of itself, so winsome that you can hardly bring yourself to dislike it, even as it succeeds in irritating the hell out of you.
Based on Charles Schulz's famous Peanuts comic strip, Snoopy! apparently won an Olivier award on its first West End outing in 1983, proving that the world really was a different place then (or that that year's Olivier award panel were all barking mad).
Larry Grossman and Hal Hackaday's score is certainly chirpy enough in that "Hey, kids, we're going to put on a musical!" kind of way, but what is distinctively Schulz in a short cartoon strip becomes schmaltz when expanded into all-singing, all-dancing scenes.
After a while, it is like watching an animated greetings card. I am curious as to who it is intended for. Adults with arrested development? Family audiences? My nine-year-olds, a generation weaned on wit of The Simpsons, sat open-mouthed with disbelief at the lack of narrative and the sheer wholesomeness of it all. Snoopy and friends are so sunny that they make The Waltons seem like a bunch of crack fiends.
The talented young cast give it 110%, but even so this mutt will surely be hounded out of the West End pretty sharpish.
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