Review Roundup: ON THE TOWN at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

Regent's Park Open Air Theatre's 2017 season opens with the musical On the Town, directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie. With music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, including the hit song "New York, New York", On the Town will be the biggest dance musical ever staged at the Open Air Theatre.

On The Town runs at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre until 1 July 2017. BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast in action below!

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Andrew Tomlins, BroadwayWorld: It's always a pleasure to visit the Open Air Theatre. On The Town works superbly in the unique outdoor setting. Whilst On The Town isn't a lifechanging or revolutionary show, with an excellent cast and creative team this production is fantastic old-school fun and well worth a look.

Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard: Musicals at this exquisite venue in Regent's Park have, quite rightly, become key fixtures on London's cultural calendar in the summer months. The levels of ambition and accomplishment increase yearly; last season's Jesus Christ Superstar won the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical. On the Town is, like its predecessors, very good, but it's best appreciated by the head rather than the heart. I admired it throughout, but was almost constantly emotionally unengaged.

Lyn Gardnet, The Guardian: From Strictly Ballroom to An American in Paris, the dance musical is very much back in fashion. Drew McOnie's revival of Leonard Bernstein's 1944 musical - an expanded version of Jerome Robbins' successful jazz ballet, Fancy Free - is as insubstantial and delicious as a melting ice-cream on a summer's day. McOnie's choreography nods to Robbins' original moves, but it has a freshly minted zing of its own that captures the youthful, glad-to-be-alive exuberance of its protagonists.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: If it's deluxe new versions of big and balletic Broadway musicals you're after, London is spoiling us this summer. Already opened: the huge, hugely enjoyable revivals of An American in Paris and 42nd Street. Opened this week: this lavish and imaginative rendering of the 1944 Leonard Bernstein musical about three horny sailors with 24 hours of shore leave in New York.

Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph: Mac is terrific as the wide-eyed, wholesome Gabey, hankering across town after the seemingly unobtainable Ivy Green (Siena Kelly), subway beauty-queen sensation "Miss Turnstiles". There's great work too from the last-minute stand-in Jacob Maynard as Chip, half-fending off Lizzy Connolly's droll and lusty cab-driver Hildy, and Samuel Edwards completes the trio as lanky Ozzie, lasciviously likened to prehistoric man by Miriam-Teak Lee's thrusting anthropologist Claire in a sequence enlivened by the buffoonish invasion of club-wielding cave-men. McOnie pointedly adds a shadowy, sultry-sorrowful male-on-male pas de deux for poignant measure too. Very charming, all told, then, but not irresistibly so.

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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