Sea Witch ★★

In a brand new adaptation for stage, YA fantasy sensation ‘Sea Witch’ storms headfirst into the West End at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

Coming in at nearly 3 hours with an interval, featuring a star-studded cast of West End regulars, an ensemble of some 20 dancers, as well as musical talents such as Michelle Visage of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame and The Wanted’s Jay McGuiness, Sea Witch is a surefire spectacle, if nothing else.

Images by Danny Kaan

The show begins with an LAPD-style light cannon beamed directly at the audience, which was in a way a nice indicator of what is to come: a barrage of thoughtless maximalism bordering on, or in fact willingly traipsing into the absurd.

The thing about Sea Witch is that it is an adaptation from a medium which is already on the verge of cultural bankruptcy. The Young Adult Fantasy Novel is a genre so oversaturated, so repetitive and ouroborically self-consuming, it is actually difficult to distinguish parody from the genuine article. Sea Witch, the novel, is in fact the genuine article, and hence the stage adaptation is cursed to suffer the crucial ailment of the genre: a complete lack of originality. On its surface a dark retelling of the backstory of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the show reads as a beat-by-beat plot-point checklist, where conflict manifests moment to moment by the random arrival of events such as “the Royal Games” wherein the two male leads must suddenly and inexplicably fight for the crown. Or for the girl? Or maybe for something else? It was unclear.

What was clear is that this is a bid to make the next Wicked: a previously unexplored shadowy villain is thrust into the redemptive limelight to the delight of soft-hearted audiences everywhere. Unfortunately, this is not Wicked. It will never be Wicked. But what could it be?

There was a point around the halfway mark where the cast almost started to lean into the comedy, deliberately overegging the melodramatic quality of the dialogue and drama – eliciting genuine laughs from the crowd. They soon pulled back, returning to their default, self-serious, semi-tragic locutions, but it did give a sense of something so-bad-it’s-good lurking beneath the surface.

Only Mazz Murray seems to really know what she’s in – delivering a delightfully severe, wonderfully serious and, at the same time, self-aware Big Brother (Orwell, not ITV2) style performance as the Queen of the fantasyland. And indeed, the dancers and performers, especially the vocal talents of the leads, are all extremely impressive. Everyone in this who dances can really dance, and everyone in this who sings can really sing. It’s a shame they’re wasted on a fatally compromised set of trope-ridden pop tunes devoid of content, purpose and feeling.

The maximalism on display is truly something. Djavan Van De Fliert as Prince Nik has so much fabric dangling off him; he more resembles a curtain shop than a monarch. The dancers’ costumes follow this trend towards the unusual, inexplicably donning bowler hats and, in a strange semi-homage to West Side Story, clicking their fingers and sidling towards the audience. The choreography in general can only be described as insane. It is as if they took a standard musical choreography and dialled everything up to 200, demanding every gesture and every motion be as quick and large as humanly possible. Everything about this show is just so loud – even the actual music and mixing of the vocals are just a few degrees too far.

The only thing that is over instead of underdone is the stage – which, hilariously, is just the show’s title in seven-foot-tall swirling block capitals – which, just in case you forgot for a second, is SEA WITCH. The title is periodically lit up with a blue water effect at various moments through the show to highlight the very Sea-Witchiness of it all.

And yet, underneath it all, there is something about this show that you cannot hate. At the end of the night, the audience is openly laughing at the climactic reveals. At one point, after a long-winded explanation of one character’s motivations to another, to which the recipient quietly takes the hand of her companion and utters the words “I understand”, an audience member loudly whispers, “I don’t.” The dancers laugh with each other as they tumble about the stage and toss each other in the air, and even the leads seem to be having fun with each other at times. This is not an icy disaster of a musical; it is the kind of bin fire where no one gets hurt. And despite the total lack of regard for narrative, one cannot deny the craft of the performers or their willingness to really commit to what they’re doing. The show is fun, to a point.

If you’re into theatrical maximalism or you’re a die-hard Michelle Visage fan, there might be something here for you. If you’re not, Wicked is still on at the Apollo Victoria.

A sea of talent stranded on an island of clichés – ★★ 2 stars

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