Charlie and the Chocolate Factory The Musical: Review

In Which I Struggle With My Love of Musical Theatre and My Hatred of This One

I love musical theatre with a passion, it's literally a massive chunk of me. Despite the fact that my music task is a lot less frivolous, I love listening to musical theatre and to be honest, if I am singing, it will be a song from musical theatre. I fall in love with the characters like that *snaps fingers* and I practically salivate all over "Once More With Feeling" which combines my two great loves - Buffy and musical theatre. It's impossible to tell you the amount of these shows I have written in my head, or directed in my head. I even have an embarrassing script for a production of "Peter and the Starcatchers" which I wrote before it actually became a stage show.

And so when, for GCSE music, my teacher announced that we would be going to see the production of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" I was absolutely ecstatic. Little did I know that but a week later, I would be using it as an example of the worst theatre show I had ever seen, in terms of things like lighting, sound and scenery in front of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and shortly after that I would be writing this. This very saddening blog post.

Despite how much I adore musical theatre, I don't get to see the shows very much at all - so I was majorly excited for this one. And I love Roald Dahl's fiction - although I do find Charlie and the Chocolate factory to occasionally come across as a little bland - and the reviews were stellar. "A lavish bonanza", "dark" and "not too sweet", I had high hopes.

The music was one of the more disappointing areas. "No one leaves the theatre, humming the scenery", and whilst I didn't, it was also the first piece of musical theatre I had ever had the privilege of watching where I left the theatre with no song stuck in my head, except "Ain't It Fun" by Paramore, which I had had stuck in my head all day. I do not even remember the songs now, writing this review, so I have to awkwardly listen to a cast recording on Spotify as I do.

The music choice was well performed, and none of the songs are bad. However, the selection isn't great. It opens with a sweet little number - Almost Nearly Perfect - which is not a bad song by any standards. However a small number sang by a child actor on a dark, with next to no movement was not the most exciting opening to a production.

By far the most interesting pieces of music in the first act were the ones in which the different children found their tickets. The songs were lively, colourful and exciting - but...they confined the staging of all of them to "inside the television", so despite their potential for a massive dance number, there was next to no movement. I must admit that of these numbers I did dislike The Double Bubble Duchess, but I'm pretty sure that was my own choice in music coming out. I have nothing against rap in musicals, but it's not my thing. In particular, the song was beautifully written and very satirical It's Teavee Time.

I didn't love the performances in the Chocolate Factory, I understand how difficult it would be to choreograph the Oompa Loompa sequences, but frankly, it was the songs that let them down here. Auf Wiedersehen Augustus Gloop is a good example of the "meh" that these songs were. About half of the song is made up of tuneless introduction singing, before actually reaching the song. In Veruca's Nutcracker Sweet we again, have disinteresting composition, although nicely performed. I was also disappointed that they used Pure Imagination, after changing Dahl's original Oompa Loompas song. If you are going to have an original score, you should have an original score and not steal songs from films.

Now, let's start on the set, because I am so interested in lighting and scenery et cetera, and in my opinion, for this play, this was the biggest downfall. The curtain lifted on the most gorgeous, intricate, almost steampunk design of a rubbish dump, in which the character Charlie climbs over to find bits and pieces he collects.

Unfortunately, this was the highlight of the set. The Bucket's house was also well done, except for the fact that in the scene where the beds moved around across the floor (it was a musical number) which made the entire set which previously had been so well done, comical and unrealistic at best.

It was inside the chocolate factory itself that really disappointed me. In terms of an arc, I had expected the first half of the story to be all dark, and then, after the Tim Burton-esque beginning, to spice up into a beautiful, colourful and intricate set. Not so. Instead, whilst we did get colour, we saw lots of scenes made up of the characters walking across a bare stage which projections on the back of the screen, which drove all too clearly the reality home that this was not real, something you want to avoid in a book, a film or musical. The scenes within the actual rooms also used relatively sparse stages - instead having the entire character of the piece determined by a few pieces at the back.

I do not say that it would both be practical to have perfectly designed sets - I instead as you to return to Matilda, another musical of another Dahl book. The set was far sparser all of the way through, in this, but it did not confine itself to the back of the stage. The 3D set aspects, which this musical was sorely lacking in, made it feel fake.

The acting was very good, but in some cases the protagonists were incredibly two dimensional. Charlie Bucket in the books is a bland good boy, and the boy who portrayed him was incredibly true to the book. However, this made it difficult for us to enjoy the plot. Indeed, my friend Kitty noted that she "wanted Mike Teavee to win because he was the most enjoyable to watch". Willy Wonka again, was two dimensional - an elusive man not quite eccentric enough to carry the storyline.

Overall, I thought that this musical was substandard, and frankly if you want to spend money on a child friendly piece of musical theatre, I would recommend "Matilda", another Roald Dahl book with a million fold better executions. This musical was certainly enjoyable, but in a kind of "well executed school play" way, and I would not recommend it.