Review Roundup: PIPPIN at Menier Chocolate Factory- Updated!

Following on from Sunday in the Park with George, Little Shop of Horrors, La Cage aux Folles, A Little Night Music and Sweet Charity, the Menier Chocolate Factory is currently presenting Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson's Pippin.

Pippin began previews on Tuesday, 22 November, opened officially last week, 7 December, and will run through 25 February, 2012. Buzz about West End and Broadway transfers of the production has already begun, with Stephen Schwartz fully supportive of both ideas. 

Charles Spencer, Telegraph: It’s all excruciatingly fey. The original production told the trite little story through a band of travelling actors. Clearly aware that this cheesy pop-rock musical is now past its sell-by date, director Mitch Sebastian has tried to make its seem “edgy” and “relevant” by presenting it all as a video game. We first encounter Pippin in a corridor leading into the auditorium, playing games on his computer and with a couple of spliffs waiting to be smoked. 

Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard: There are all manner of sophisticated projected graphics, the talking head of a decapitated Visigoth and an effervescent unitard-clad ensemble, for whom some of Fosse's original choreography has been recreated, whose cheeky dancing sees Cabaret blended with robotics. Bird's idea is, rightly, pushed to the hilt by director Mitch Sebastian but the problem at the show's heart remains. If we don't care about the existential crisis plaguing Pippin in the musical that bears his name, what hope is there for any real emotional engagement.

Paul Taylor, The Independent: Imagine The Fantasticks relocated to 2090 and set in a suicide chat-room run by androids. It feels that surreal. There are some definite advantages to the techno-approach. It makes the warped agenda of Matt Rawles's psychopathically smiling narrator seems all the more mountingly Mephistophelean. And it means that when Pippin finally comes to his senses and realises that the answer lies in the simple love of Carly Bawden's very touching Catherine and her son, the return to the bare human basics in a denuded theatre feels like truly a vertiginous plunge. 

Matt Wolfe, The Arts Desk: Should the people who made Tron - or for that matter James Cameron - ever decide to take on a Broadway musical, they owe themselves a trip to the Menier Chocolate Factory's ludicrous production of Pippin to find out how not to do it. Just because this long-running New York entry was the first Broadway show to advertise on American TV nearly 40 years ago, that doesn't mean it also needs to be the first in my experience to be transformed into a video game so as to accommodate contemporary tastes.

Andrew Girvan, Whatsonstage: There is no denying that it isn't fiendishly clever, but by the time that the roar of the projectors overhead has passed and we reach the finale in the stark floodlight of "reality", the strong leading performance from Hepple feels like it has had to cut through techno distractions, whilst some of the patchier cast simply hide behind it. Maybe the greatest problem here is that there is no turmoil to be had, when we have been convinced so successfully that it's really all just a game.

Kate Kellaway, Observer: There are some feisty performances. Pippin, in baggy T-shirt, is well played by Harry Hepple with fresh voice and honest manner. His narcissist brother, Lewis (David Page), is a fabulous dancer (on stage too briefly). Frances Ruffelle razzle-dazzles as Pippin's saucy stepmother. Louise Gold, as his granny, does her ironic best with a dubious song about making the most of old age while Carly Bawden's lissome Catherine does all she can with youth.

Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail: I’ve never seen anything like this nerdish, video game revival of the Sixties musical that time forgot. The passage to the auditorium is even mocked up to give it the feel of an adolescent boy’s bedroom. It can only lead to the artistic equivalent of mouldy socks, fetid air and grubby joysticks.

Michael Billington, Guardian: Towards the end of this revival of a long-forgotten 1972 musical, it suddenly hit me what I was watching: Broadway's answer to Peer Gynt. Both feature a hero who roams the world in search of self, but who ends up awakened to the virtues of home and hearth. But I can't help feeling that Ibsen's play is more dramatically colourful and, thanks to Grieg's incidental music, has better tunes.

Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times: If, like me, you regularly misinterpret the phrase “on Wii” in video game commercials as “ennui”, you may not be hugely grabbed by the concept behind this revival of Stephen Schwartz’s musical (unseen in London since its 1973 UK premiere). What was originally a troupe of slightly sinister travelling players is now a bunch of silver-Lycra’d digital avatars, though still marshalled by a “Leading Player”. When he introduces characters as “Player 1” and so on, this update makes a previously Brechtian touch now suggest an online multiplayer game.

Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton

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