Theatre review: 101 Dalmatians

Both the shows I saw this week shared a common theme of me not having any intention whatsoever of booking for them, until the casting made them a lot harder to skip. Chasing Hares did prove to be worth catching, but I'm afraid I can't say the same for 101 Dalmatians: The big attraction here was Kate Fleetwood landing the iconic role of Cruella de Vil; but if you essentially hobble her from the start with woeful dialogue and a half-hearted reimagining, there's not much she can do to salvage the evening. Timothy Sheader's production for the Open Air Theatre goes back to the original Dodie Smith book for inspiration, while Douglas Hodge (music and lyrics) and Johnny McKnight's (book) musical is adapted from an earlier stage version by Zinnie Harris. Or to put it another way, this is nothing to do with the Disney^TM versions, that shit's way too expensive to license.

Instead we get a version of Cruella who's a modern-day influencer and occasional right-wing TV rent-a-gob, who murdered her sister and has turned her nephews Casper (Jonny Weldon) and Jasper (George Bukhari) into her dim-witted henchmen.

After an anti-dog rant gains her a surprising amount of new followers she decides to lean into this, and wear a coat made from the skins of 99 Dalmatian puppies. But she reckons without a particularly feisty litter among those she abducts: Pongo (Ben Thompson & Danny Collins) and Perdi (Yana Penrose & Emma Lucia) have a meet-cute when their "pet" humans become a couple, and end up with a litter of 15 who are among those stolen by Cruella. Four of these manage to escape, and seek out their parents to help them rescue the rest.

101 Dalmatians is a chaotic show, and not in a charming way. Instead it's a total mess of ideas and tones, aiming its humour primarily at the kids but not even reaching the level of a B-minus panto, with jokes about Laika that then require an explanation about the first dog in space - because everyone knows the best jokes are the one you have to laboriously explain afterwards. Its dealing with the black comedy of someone who wants to skin puppies alive doesn't fit comfortably with this, so the scenes of spinning blades and electrified cages end up underplayed. As a musical, its styles are more muddled than eclectic, and the songs rather disjointedly drift in and out of the action: Turns out Douglas Hodge is to musical theatre songwriting what Douglas Hodge is to understated musical theatre performance.

The attempts to modernise are also pretty cringeworthy: Sheader, Hodge and McKnight throw in references to followers, likes, getting cancelled, incels (!) the obligatory visual Boris gag, and even a non-binary puppy, with little to convince me they know what any of the words mean - all the street cred of the world's whitest grandad attempting to rap. Worst of all, the reinvention of Cruella as an influencer leaves her as a one-note, dated gag with no sign of a signature acerbic line. I know direct quotes from the films will have been a no-no, but at the very least I'd expect a Cruella comeback to be some kind of camp bitchiness, not "...yeah, wha'ever." It's such a shame because in a couple of solo songs Fleetwood gets to show a glimpse of what kind of performance she might have given with any material to actually get her teeth into.

Similarly, the poster photo of Fleetwood looks perfect; but the actual costume (Katrina Lindsay,) hair and makeup design seems to be modeled on Michelle Visage. It's a fun gag on paper, but in practice the real Visage has looked more Cruella de Vil than this. And while we're on design, there's no way not to mention the puppets that bring the animals to life: Toby Olié is an experienced puppet creator and this show was ready to go on stage in 2020, so it's hard to see how in the intervening two years nobody noticed that Pongo and Perdi appear to be getting fucked by their puppeteers. Add the cats that rip themselves apart and have body parts wander off stage, and the finale where puppy heads are apparently mounted on the walls, and this story of animal cruelty does end up being a bit disturbing, just not in the intended ways. The show ends with a real dalmatian puppy being brought on stage; it's very cute, but it clearly desperately wanted to get the hell out of there. Understandably.

101 Dalmatians by Douglas Hodge and Johnny McKnight, based on the book by Dodie Smith and a stage adaptation by Zinnie Harris, is booking until the 28th of August at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Senior.