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PADDINGTON – The Musical

Music and lyrics by Tom Fletcher 

Book by Jessica Swale

based on ‘A Bear Called Paddington’ by Michael Bond and the film ‘Paddington’

directed by Luke Sheppard

Savoy Theatre, London – open-ended run

running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval 

https://paddingtonthemusical.com

Entertainment juggernauts seldom come as cuddly and adorable as this. With Paddington, Jessica Swale (book) and Tom Fletcher (songs), in bringing Michael Bond’s most beloved Peruvian bear to the stage, have created the musical we probably all need right now. That’s not just because the diminutive ursine charmer is a fur-covered emblem of kindness and tenacity, or even that Luke Sheppard’s barnstorming production feels like a love letter to the polyglot vitality of London at a time when tolerance and diversity are increasingly coming under fire. Not since the criminally underrated Madness tuner Our House has a new musical trumpeted so persuasively the capital’s unique combination of tradition, freedom of expression and joyful strangeness, and celebrated its visual iconography (there’s glimpses of various landmarks from St Paul’s and Buckingham Palace to the Shard and the London Eye).

It’s also because 2025 has been a pretty ropey year for new West End musicals (Evita, thrilling as it was, counts as a revival): Clueless was a lot of fun but The Great Gatsby, Hercules and Burlesque were mediocre at best, Shucked lost something in its transatlantic crossing and the final Sondheim, the incomplete Here We Are, was a triumph at the National but was too esoteric for some. My favourite musicals of the last twelve months – Lovestuck, Sing Street and the current Southwark Playhouse smash Ride The Cyclone – were/are all off-West End, but now finally commercial mainstream London theatre has an outright winner…and Paddington is the absolute bear’s whiskers.

Following more or less the plot of the 2014 movie, where an evil taxidermist (Nicole Kidman on film, here on stage a gloriously scenery-chewing Victoria Hamilton-Barritt) entices Paddington away from his adopted London family in order to do the unspeakable, the musical works exquisitely on multiple levels. Sheppard’s production is grand enough to feel like the big, lavish extravaganza West End ticket prices demand. But it’s also intimate enough that the delicious eccentricities, quirks and running jokes register, as do the finesses in expression of Paddington himself, as split between an offstage voice and an onstage actor in a gorgeous bear costume (brilliant work by Tahra Zafar, also responsible for puppet design), played respectively by James Hameed and, on the night I attended, Abbie Purvis (alternate to Arti Shah). You will fall in love with this bear, and it’s impossible to overstate just how right the team here have got the onstage representation of this most adored of anthropomorphic characters. 

There is generally a lot here to love though. Ellen Kane’s choreography is sharp and propulsive, unerringly successful in building numbers to their fizzy showbiz climaxes. Tom Pye’s magical scenic creations, Gabrielle Slade’s vivid costumes, Neil Austin’s lighting and Ash J Woodward’s entrancing video designs all combine to create a world at once comfortingly familiar yet exciting. It’s a fabulous eyeful and, thanks to Gareth Owen’s full-on sound design and Fletcher’s ear-worm tunes, a satisfyingly loud earful.

Then there’s the uniformly fine casting. Amy Ellen Richardson’s Mrs Brown, as sensitive and artistic as she’s kookie, and Paddington’s most prominent advocate, is the gorgeous beating heart of the piece apart from the bear himself. Adrian der Gregorian convincingly charts Mr Brown’s journey from self-protective scepticism to full on embrace of Paddington’s uncynical world view. The writing and acting of their tricky relationship has beautiful, convincing detail where a lesser adaptation would make them more generalised malcontents. Bonnie Langford is a show-stopping delight as the housekeeper with a backstory as rich as any encyclopaedia, and West End veteran Teddy Kempner scores a joyful bullseye as shopkeeper Mr Gruber.

Tom Edden and Amy Booth-Steel come close to stealing every scene they’re in as, respectively, an uptight cab driver impervious to Paddington’s cuteness, at least initially, and a hysterically plummy aristocrat who jealously guards an elite society for geographers. Seasoned musical goers may feel they’ve seen Hamilton-Barritt’s uber-camp, statuesque ‘baddie’ performance before, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but previous iterations of this flamboyant characterisation were generally in infinitely inferior shows, and she is terrific here. So too is Tarinn Callender as her reluctant henchman.

Sheppard’s staging and Swale’s writing feel wonderfully fresh, balancing the cute, the sinister and the flat-out hilarious with wonderfully sure hands. For all the showbiz brio on display, there’s something unmistakably British in the nods to panto and old time music hall. If there’s a tiny flaw, it’s that it occasionally feels a little over-stuffed with themes and ideas all pulling focus at once: a tentative romance between eldest Brown daughter and the son of Brenda Edwards’ life-embracing next door neighbour is well played by Delilah Bennett-Cardy and Timi Akinyosade but doesn’t add much to a slightly overlong show. Neither does a second act full kick-line number for a tribe of geographers, despite being brilliantly staged and led with hilarious verve by Booth-Steel.

Fletcher’s songs sound a bit generic modern musical theatre from time to time, but at its best the score is rousing and fiendishly catchy. The Calypso-tinged anthem ‘The Rhythm of London’ is a bona fide classic, and Hamilton-Barritt’s swaggeringly nasty ‘Pretty Little Dead Things’ brings the house down and will be stuck in your head for weeks.

Crucially, Paddington deftly achieves the almost impossible in that it entrances the children while also winking knowingly over their head at the adults, generally giving everyone a fabulous night or afternoon out. Apart from the ingenuity of how Paddington himself is created, this is a pretty traditional musical, but one crafted with huge love and care by people who really know what they’re doing. If the Savoy Theatre is looking for a new tenant within at least the next five years, I’ll be astonished.