ajhlovestheatre

THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL

conceived by Tina Landau

book by Kyle Jarrow

based on the Nickelodeon series by Stephen Hillenberg

directed by Tara Overfield Wilkinson

Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre London – until 27 August 2023 then touring to Plymouth and Newcastle

https://www.spongebobstage.com

As happened previously with the now indispensable musicalisation of the Shrek animated movie, there was some surprise that SpongeBob turned out to be an unexpectedly decent tuner when it hit the Broadway stage in 2017, courtesy of doyenne of the avant garde NYC theatre scene Tina Landau. That gargantuan original staging, stuffed to the gills (pun intended) with quality pop songs written for the project by everyone from Waitress’s Sara Bareilles through Cyndi Lauper and Aerosmith to John Legend, turned the cavernous Palace Theatre on Times Square into an underwater wonderland.

From the moment you walked through the foyer doors you were immersed in all things Bikini Bottom, the happy-go-lucky, garishly coloured ocean floor hamlet where the bonkers cartoon is set, and a live foley artist dressed as a pirate punctuated every moment of the show from an elaborate booth set up in one of the boxes. It was astonishing, and deflected attention from some of the storytelling plot holes in Kyle Jarrow’s zany, often very funny but not always coherent, script, something that a slightly more modest staging like this one can’t quite manage.

Still, if Tara Overfield Wilkinson’s joyously caffeinated touring production, decked out in suitably vivid designs that marry objects aquatic with environmental awareness and sci-fi (Steve Howell – set, Sarah Mercadé – costumes) and choreographed to within an inch of its life by Olivier nominee Fabian Aloise, doesn’t match the Broadway level of extravagance, it captures precisely the combination of lunacy and benign anarchy that defines the cartoon franchise. It may not be as visually overwhelming as Landau’s – and that foley booth is reduced to an inconsistently used solo microphone on the edge of the false proscenium – but it still has an awful lot going for it.

Principally, there’s the performance of rising star Lewis Cornay in the title role, nailing the distinctive vocals – somewhere between a kazoo and a gurgle – that will be required by fans of the original, while investing the beloved, endlessly optimistic sea sponge with an impressively athletic, angular physicality, real heart and oodles of off-beat charm. It’s a winning central turn, impossible not to warm to, and when he lets rip with the songs it’s pretty thrilling stuff.

Then there’s Aloise’s glorious, rousing choreography, which combines trad Broadway moves (look out for the second half tap number for Squidward and a troupe of über-camp anemones) with street dance and the constant ripple movement of undersea currents. Other pleasures include Irfan Damani, adorable as Patrick Star, SpongeBob’s endearingly clumsy starfish sidekick who suddenly develops an ego the size of a house thanks to the adoration of a school of sardines, and Richard J Hunt as the robustly mercenary crab restauranteur Eugene Krabs, more preoccupied with making a buck than preserving the common good. Hannah Lowther is great fun as a villainous sentient computer (called Karen because, you know, this is Bikini Bottom), and the diverse ensemble of kookie eccentrics are a hardworking, multi-quick changing bunch of superb singer-dancers. The production is lit with flair and invention by Ben Bull.

It’s typical of Overfield Wilkinson’s crazy but witty vision that the tallest person in the cast is playing the tiniest character on the ocean bed (the statuesque and authentically fabulous Divina De Campo clearly having a ball as Bikini Bottom’s nemesis, the spiteful single celled organism Sheldon J Plankton). At the performance I saw, associate director Blair Anderson covered, rather splendidly, for Tom Read Wilson as lugubrious mollusc Squidward Q Tentacles, and I enjoyed Chrissie Bhima’s powerfully sung, if overly manic, scientific squirrel Sandy Cheeks. Her costuming is puzzling, giving little indication of being permanently in a diving suit (the friend I saw the show with assumed she was a jellyfish until there were references to her being a land mammal).

Enjoyable though most of it undoubtedly is, the whole enterprise suffers drastically, at least in this London tour stop, from a truly ghastly sound system that renders a minimum of fifty per cent of the words completely unintelligible, flattens the harmonies and generally makes the music pretty underwhelming. That’s such a shame as this eclectic, dynamic score, ranging from rap to glam rock, from disco pop to country, there’s even a joyous sea shanty for a bunch of disgruntled pirates at the top of act two…, is full of absolute bangers, although you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the way they sound here. It’s simultaneously muffled and never quite loud enough, as though the whole thing were taking place, well, underwater.

It may be that the Queen Elizabeth Hall just isn’t a suitable space for musicals (Dolly Parton’s Smokey Mountain Christmas Carol and Bring It On! both felt occasionally underpowered in here): there’s no theatrical atmosphere, it’s extremely wide (the SpongeBob set occupies far too little of the space, rendering huge portions of the side seating blocks as restricted view) and the acoustics are deadening. I wish I had seen this in a traditional venue, more sympathetic to a show which relies so heavily on deranged charm and throwaway humour, such as either of the Theatre Royals of Plymouth or Newcastle where SpongeBob is travelling to in September.

Those reservations aside, this remains a highly original, delightfully flamboyant piece of musical theatre. It’s apocalyptic premise (SpongeBob, Sandy and pals are in a race against time to save Bikini Bottom from complete extinction following a forecast eruption by an underwater volcano) felt rather more far fetched in 2017 than it does now unfortunately, but the gallery of weird and wonderful characters, the refreshingly uncynical belief in the power of friendship and the dynamite collection of songs (if only we could hear them properly) ensure that this is still predominantly a feel good night out. If it sometimes feels a bit relentless, that’s a reflection on the source material, but it remains a well cast, potentially migraine-inducing, high camp spectacle with a satisfying balance between sentimentality and comic nuttiness, and several memorably inventive moments.