The Devil Wears Prada musical review – couture or off-the-rack?

The Devil Wears Prada has cult movie status and a devoted fan base. Sadly, this new stage adaptation has settled for mediocrity.

In case you’ve miraculously avoided the film for the past 18 years, it’s a classic dance-with-the-devil plot – but make it fashion! Andy, a recent university graduate, has moved to New York with big dreams of becoming a serious journalist. But after countless interviews, she’s willing to take whatever she can. Despite having no interest in fashion, she commits to working the job “a million girls would kill for” as the second assistant to the chief editor of Runway magazine. But at what cost?

It’s important to say early on that the performers themselves could not be working harder. The rest of the creative team can be tossed away with last season’s oversized blazers, but casting director Jill Green has done an immaculate job with the tools she’s been given.

Vanessa Williams is an obvious option when you look at her previous role in Ugly Betty as another cruel fashion editor, and she’s a different enough choice to Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly. You can see Georgie Buckland’s (Andy) wide eyes from the back of the circle, and Amy Di Bartolomeo plays the catty English first assistant Emily with aplomb. The singing is spectacular, and the chorus line has not a single high kick out of place.

The problem, alas, is not with the performances themselves, but in the creative choices that were made long before auditions began. For starters, the costumes are deeply disappointing. If this were any other show, they would be fine, but the issue is that this is a show about fashion. Tens of shoddy fake Chanel jackets do not a fashion show make. Granted, Williams’ wardrobe has some moments: the multiple fabulous coats to match each outfit, and her devil-red sequined gala dress, all carefully designed by Pamella Roland. But the point of the Runway office is that it is filled with impossibly glamorous women, not just one.

If you don’t look too closely at any one costume, some of the big chorus numbers might have you fooled: in the big glow-up where Andy enters the magazine’s walk-in sample wardrobe, everyone’s enthusiastically dancing around singing “dress your way up”, and the bright garish colours might have you thinking everyone looks amazing. But once the eye focuses, you realise everyone is simply wearing ugly skirt suits. And the cherry on the cake: Andy finally appears in her new look, and it’s an outfit entirely lifted from the film, except it now looks cheap.

The problem with reinterpreting a film like The Devil Wears Prada for stage is that they already hit the best marks the first time: how do you beat a power team of Streep, Stanley Tucci, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt? Well, you have to offer an entirely fresh take. Unfortunately, despite having Elton John on staff, the tunes are mostly lacklustre and the script in between is just a regurgitation of the film’s best-known lines. The title number, which one would presume would be the big catchy standard, sounds like a Christmas charity song, and there are way too many slow power ballads.

In the second act, we’re finally treated to something truly fabulous as the Eiffel Tower comes into sparkling view and an ominous, bass-heavy “Paris, City of Dreams” sets the tone for Andy’s final transformation to the delectable dark side of fashion.

There are other moments such as Emily’s drug-induced hospital hallucination with a chorus line of “hot (male) nurses” that hint at the campy brilliance this show might have offered. But these sequences are short-lived and ultimately unsating.

Ultimately, The Devil Wears Prada is promising couture but offering something off-the-rack. And… that’s all.