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Performance times are: Tue 19:00. Wed-Sat 19:30. Wed,Sat Mats 14:30. Sun 15:00
Synopsis
Follow the yellow brick road over the rainbow and into The London Palladium, the capital's home of the family musical with Sophie Evans (BBC's smash hit Over The Rainbow) as Dorothy.
Andrew Lloyd Webber's new production of The Wizard of Oz is an enchanting adaptation of the all time classic, totally reconceived for the stage by the award-winning creative team that delighted audiences of all ages with their recent London Palladium revival of The Sound of Music.
Developed from the ever popular MGM screenplay this new production contains all the much-loved songs from the Oscar winning movie score, all the favourite characters and iconic moments, plus a few surprises along the way, including new songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Click your heels together and join Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion, Dorothy and her little dog Toto, as they journey through the magical land of Oz to meet the Wizard and obtain their heart's desires. Watch out for the Wicked Witch of the West and her winged monkeys as you rediscover the real story of Oz in this fantastic musical treat for all the family.
Get your Wizard of Oz tickets now for the biggest theatre event of the year!
Danielle Hope (Dorothy), Michael Crawford (Wizard) & Toto
Date: 2 March 2011
The Wizard of Oz, one of the year’s biggest musical productions, opened last night at the London Palladium (1 March 2011, previews from 7 February).
With a cast led by Over the Rainbow winner Danielle Hope (Dorothy), original Phantom Michael Crawford (The Wizard) and West End stalwart Hannah Waddingham (The Wicked Witch), the production includes new songs written by Lloyd Webber and lyricist Tim Rice, working together for the first time in 34 years.
The Wizard of Oz is helmed by the same creative team behind Lloyd Webber’s Whatsonstage.com Award-winning revival of The Sound of Music starring his first reality TV winner Connie Fisher – director Jeremy Sams, designer Robert Jones and choreographer Arlene Phillips.
Will the blockbuster production match the success of its ‘prequel’ across town, Wicked? Here’s a selection of overnight opinions posted so far…
"The thing about 16 year-old Judy Garland in the 1939 MGM movie was her headlong, astonishing childish maturity and star quality; 18 year-old Danielle is lovely – and much better than a rather grim-jawed Imelda Staunton in the charmless 1987 RSC stage version – but she’s ‘acting’ a role, not living it, and adjusting her new companions to her own niceness, not discovering their innate qualities. What’s missing? Yearning, desperation, love; that’s all … Jeremy Sams’ production, beautifully designed by Robert Jones (apart from the terrible Wizard face-projecting video), takes us from the dark Kansas vistas of furrowed fields to the green art deco Palace of Oz, via the revolving cornfield and flower banks along the Yellow Brick Road; a colourful eyeball feast, all right … David Cullen’s elegant, always interesting orchestrations are slyly creative throughout, and there’s some typically energetic choreography from Arlene Phillips on the revolving stage.”
“The fact is that I have never been a friend of Dorothy and have always cordially loathed The Wizard of Oz … I can’t pretend that I experienced a damascene conversion at this lavish new stage version, for which the BBC generously provided so much free advertising with the popular talent contest Over the Rainbow, but I did at least manage to sit through it without throwing up in the aisle … I wouldn’t get too excited by the prospect of the handful of new songs written by the old firm of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, though Red Shoes Blues sung by Hannah Waddingham’s magnificently malevolent Wicked West of the Witch brings some welcome wit to the party … Danielle Hope, who won the competition to play Dorothy, offers a thoroughly competent rather than an inspired performance … Quite why Michael Crawford has bothered to come out of semi-retirement to play Professor Marvel and the Wizard is a mystery to me.”
“Jeremy Sams' production is a marvel of beguiling narrative fluency and, with Richard Jones' superb designs, of endlessly witty and spectacular visual invention – from the digitally-enhanced hurricane transition to Oz to the skeletally twisted Gothic palace of the Wicked Witch and her totalitarian, helmeted guards … You can't fault the proficiency of Hope's performance or her clear, serviceable singing. But while there is appeal in the way she shows how Dorothy's game and generous spirit always overcomes her nerves, Hope is never going to break your heart, as Garland does with the ache of her yearning to escape from and then get back to Kansas. Her rendition of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ sounds a shade too studied as opposed to vulnerable and spontaneous … I found myself touched by the endlessly endearing Westmoreland terrier (one of four rotating in the role) who didn't put a paw wrong as Toto.”
"The most appealing star of Lord Lloyd Webber’s latest telly-marketing musical is not veteran hoofer Michael Crawford or even Danielle Hope, the dark-haired song thrush who warbled her way to stardom via a BBC talent show. It is Toto the West Highland terrier … the Munchkins are a mixture of sticky-sweet children and grinning adults, in blue-checked pinnies and bonnets. They look like some terrible stereotype of an American Mormon family … Miss Hope is more than efficient as Dorothy. She has a clear, strong voice and a broad-shouldered confidence … Arlen’s great 'Over The Rainbow' comes awkwardly early. The bolt is shot barely ten minutes into the evening. Miss Hope delivers it tidily enough but there was a sense of anti-climax afterwards … To be honest, the dramatic buzz here is not much better than you’d find at a decent pantomime.”
"The Victorian theatre of spectacle is alive and well, and residing at the London Palladium. But although this adaptation of the Frank Baum book and the 1939 movie, with additional songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, is quite an eyeful, it's somewhat lacking in humanity. I came out feeling blitzkrieged rather than charmed. The star of the show is undoubtedly the set and costume designer, Robert Jones … The Yellow Brick Road is on a tilted revolve from inside which poppyfields and labyrinthine forest emerge. The Emerald City is full of steeply inclined walls suggesting a drunkard's vision of the Chrysler Building lobby. And the Wicked Witch of the West inhabits a rotating dungeon that might be a Piranesi nightmare … one has to admire the director and co-adaptor, Jeremy Sams, for marshalling the effects. But the story and the people get swamped. Danielle Hope shows a natural, easy presence as Dorothy, but can't hope to compete with the scenery. Even Michael Crawford, playing both Professor Marvel and The Wizard, seems slightly subdued.”
Libby Purves The Times ★★★★
“Hope is charming: sweetly naive and sincere. When she first soars into ‘Over the Rainbow’ without a tremor, applause stops the action … The tornado gets applause too — no mechanical or projection device is spared as the farmhouse whirls through outer space to land in the primary-coloured toytown of Oz, with a pair of dead witch’s legs under it … The three friends on the road are fun - Paul Keating physically fearless and funny as the Scarecrow, and David Ganly a very camp lion (‘I am proud be a friend of Dorothy’). But for all the fabulous forest, and the glorious pipework and levers and dials of Oz’s lair, it didn’t move me … The second half takes off, being darker and nicely frightening. Hannah Waddingham gives the witch real viciousness, even with Rice-rhymes like ‘she’s prissy, she’s clueless, I want her shoeless’ … Crawford brings vulnerability and humour. I warmed to it at last, despite a helpless sense that it’s a juggernaut. A predetermined hit.”
Dorothy in dungarees after Garland in gingham? In the new stage version of The Wizard of Oz at the Palladium, TV’s reality show star Danielle Hope slouches around the place like a down home dullsville suddenly transfigured by singing “Over the Rainbow” with a bell-like purity and passion.
Before then, though, she has to sing a superfluous but brilliantly executed song, one of a new few, by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber – “Nobody Understands Me” – that sets the stage musical off on a reflective, philosophical tangent to the perfect screen original.
The thing about 16 year-old Judy Garland in the 1939 MGM movie was her headlong, astonishing childish maturity and star quality; 18 year-old Danielle is lovely – and much better than a rather grim-jawed Imelda Staunton in the charmless 1987 RSC stage version – but she’s “acting” a role, not living it, and adjusting her new companions to her own niceness, not discovering their innate qualities. What’s missing? Yearning, desperation, love; that’s all.
Not least among the evening’s pleasures is matching the clever, conscientious rhyming of Rice’s new lyrics against the unforced vernacular elegance of Yip Harburg’s. And Lloyd Webber’s music, some of it incidental, some of it melodramatic (especially for the Wicked Witch) is not only not his absolute best, but also curiously uninspired; this is not these boys’ right reunion show.
Because Michael Crawford is playing Professor Marvel (and the Wizard) he has to have a second scene travelogue song, “Wonders of the World,” that is as flat as a pancake; similarly, his act one finale, “Bring Me the Broomstick” is all unmelodious puff and wind, and Crawford fires zero comedy sparks on playing tour guides and doormen as prelude to the revelation.
Jeremy Sams’ production, beautifully designed by Robert Jones (apart from the terrible Wizard face-projecting video), takes us from the dark Kansas vistas of furrowed fields to the green art deco Palace of Oz, via the revolving cornfield and flower banks along the Yellow Brick Road; a colourful eyeball feast, all right.
And the daring descent from the dizzyingly high ceiling of an unrecognisable, hook-nosed and hilarious Hannah Waddingham as the Wicked Witch is a neat riposte to all that Spiderman silliness in New York. Overall, though, I was less than pole-axed by this revival, which doesn’t have a comparable artistic urgency behind it as the same team’s The Sound of Music.
The Munchkins, thank heavens, are nearly normal, not a bunch of squawky midgets, and there’s a couple of lovely cinematic gags for David Ganley’s Cowardly Lion – “the lion sleeps tonight” in the poppy field and he’s a lion in winter in the snow storm.
These friends of Dorothy are under-cast, though; we need a great tragic Gambon type as the Lion, if we don’t have vaudevillian successors to Bert Lahr. Edward Baker-Duly’s robotic Tin Man and Paul Keating’s floppy, red-nosed Scarecrow are a bit more like it, but not funny, or nearly loveable, enough.
David Cullen’s elegant, always interesting orchestrations are slyly creative throughout, and there’s some typically energetic choreography from Arlene Phillips on the revolving stage before Waddingham lets rip in her big new blues number (though it’s not about to become a standard), and there’s a sweetly imaginative new coda back in Dorothy’s bedroom.
Some glancing details are treasurable: the chorus of puppet crows in the cornfield; the flying silhouette of Miss Gulch on her bicycle; the reclining gates and overwhelming brass engine room at Oz; the interweaving of offstage effects and little Welsh terrier Toto’s stoical barks and bites; and the pleasure, I concede, of an audience greeting a very old friend and celebrating a very great movie.
This is the second time I've seen this show. Went on 1st December and it was creaking along like it had been running for twenty years. Nobody seemed to have their heart in it. Lacklustre was the word that came to mind. When I saw this two months ago the performances were crackling and dynamic..last night as wet as the rain outside. Danielle Hope is fairly consistent but she lacks "star quality" for me and I found her Over the Rainbow underpowered. Michael Crawford looked tired and didn't get laughs. Even the Scarecrow and Tin Man found it hard going. The sets won me over again despite there being an unscheduled stop for some sticking scenery, they were still impressive. Business wasn't good and a half full Palladium is a sorry sight and I know for certain many seats were discounted. After the Christmas peak I would be surprised if this show can keep running at these audience levels. Perhaps it will be sorted out at the cast change time in February one way or another. Disappointing overall. - Stuart
02 Dec 11
This stage production was fantastic, I thought the wicked witch was the best, but the rest of the cast was wonderful, I was singing along, even the dog was amazing. go and see this show you will not be disappointed. - wendy benson
29 Aug 11
Unbelievable, it was FANTASTIC. everything was great, the actors were stunning.
i just want to know how they do all that wind actions etcc..
Overall an enjoyable night at the london palladium :) - Gareth Holt
04 Aug 11
It's hard not to compare such a well known and loved tale to the film which it is based on, but one cannot help doing this when watching this production, and ultimately, it falls a bit flat.
Dorothy is competent but fails to connect to the audience. Her songs are sung well but without any real emotion or heart. The extra songs written for the production were not very memorable. Out of the cast, the lion and the wicked witch were probably the best, but the tin-man and scarecrow lacked any true connection to the audience and were not a patch on the original actors. Michael Crawford's numbers were uninspired and he does not appear on stage very much so if you are going especially to see him you will be disappointed.
The rest of the cast were competent but there were just not ENOUGH of them! There are about 10 munchkins in total and the munchkin-land scenes lacked any real depth or 'wow' factor because of this, not to mention the fact that their costumes were in two colours and lacked the spectacular splash of colour as the movie.
The set was well down however, and the hurricane scene was very clever. However, the yellow brick road could have been executed far better and basically consists of a revolving yellow polo mint that the actors strut around.
I also felt that the roles of Uncle Henry and Aunty Em were badly miscast, the actors playing them far too young to convey the roles convincingly. The dog was well trained although the 'wrong' breed for purists of the story (a west highland instead of a cairn terrier).
The show would be enjoyed by children but leaves a bit to be desired in terms of such a large scale west end production. Probably not one of Webber's finest moments. Summary: Competent but uninspired and lacklustre. - Louise
26 Jul 11
very well done
superb staging
great actors
a very exciting, fun and glittery night!
- alexis
07 Jun 11
Great production! Danielle Hope is an excellent Dorothy and Hannah Waddingham and Emily Tierney are excellent as well. The whole cast does a great job, and the additional songs work well with the existing Oz classics. The sets and costumes are amazing, and I love that they did not try to copy the film design. It's a very well done, entertaining production. - Michelle
30 Apr 11
Went to see Wizard of Oz last night, was a brilliant production, it has so many negative comments and I cannot understand why. The computer graphics were amazing and all actors were very good. Yes, Michael Crawford is not in it much, but in the orginal film, the 'wizard' is not in it much either - just a big loud voice until the machine breaks and he appears, so understand why he wasn't in it much! Totally worth going, I would love to go again. - Anna
28 Apr 11
Andrew Lloyd Webber has claimed that The Wizard of Oz has never been staged successfully which is not strictly true as I can remember a wonderful Christmas production at the Palace Theatre in Westcliff about fifteen years ago. What this production proves however is that if you stay true to a much loved film and invest in a lavish and inventive design the result is a show which deserves to be a long running success. Robert Jones is the major contributor, taking us from a sepia-tinged Kansas via an impressive tornado to a technicolour Oz with the best use of a revolve since His Dark Materials. Thankfully Lloyd Webber has not repeated his mistake with Love Never Dies and every character is immediately recognisable from the film and all the familiar songs are superbly performed. Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice have added some new songs, most notably one for the Wicked Witch (who is definitely not Elphaba) and a beautiful anthem to home which is as good as anything ALW has come up with for twenty years. Danielle Hope as Dorothy is as good as her TV auditions suggested she would be, if lacking in vulnerability, Michael Crawford brings loads of personality to the Wizard even if he doesn't have that much to do and Edward Baker-Duly is impressive as tap dancing Tin Man. The Wizard of Oz is guaranteed to be a success thanks to the film's vast fan base and the BBC's free publicity, but this production fully deserves to be a huge family favourite. - David Baxter
09 Apr 11
I think Danielle (Dorothy) has lots of promise - not quite realised in this show as yet. She needs to do her own thing more - it seems to me that, if anything, she has been given too much direction. The effects and staging are seriously impressive and the music and orchestration I found very enjoyable. A bit more heart in the acting and this show will be a big hit, I reckon. - Tony Hindle
27 Mar 11
I really liked this production. Much better than the overrated "Wicked". Loved the sepia to colour effect, the cyclone and the performances of the Tin Man, Scarecrow,Lion and, best of all, Hannah Waddingham as the witch. Danielle Hope makes a creditable stage debut.Although I am not a great ALW fan his songs here worked well and I liked the low key ending and the way they resisted finishing with a big singalong number. I realise this disappointed some audience members but this was a good ending to a well directed and thought out production which was not, as some have suggested, a pantomime style show. My only criticism was that Arlene Phillips choreography was distinctly uninspired. - Diane
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