Theatre review: The BFG

As regular readers will both know, Roald Dahl's children's fiction was never part of my childhood (I mainly knew him for Tales of the Unexpected and as Britain's second favourite comedy bigot after Alf Garnett,) so going to Stratford-upon-Avon for The RSC BFG at the RST wasn't particularly on my to-do list until it turned out Tom Wells was on writing duty. And while he doesn't give the Big Friendly Giant quite the level of double entendre filth he used to bring to the Lyric Hammersmith pantos, there's still a trademark wit - I did like a small girl wearily accepting her fate as a giant's dinner with "well, I'm eight, I've had a good innings." Sophie (Martha Bailey Vine, Elsie Laslett or Ellemie Shivers) and Kimberley (Maisy Lee, Charlotte Jones or Uma Patel) live together in an orphanage until the former is abducted by a giant.

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.

Theatre review: The Boy in the Dress

With Cameron Mackintosh recently finding a loophole around having to give them a cut of the Les Misérables profits, it's not surprising if the RSC are on the lookout for another big musical earner to replace it, and join Matilda as a way of bankrolling some of their less commercial work. And it's definitely the latter show they have in mind with this new musical of David Walliams' popular children's novel The Boy in the Dress - just as Walliams' books themselves invite a Roald Dahl comparison by using Quentin Blake illustrations, so Robert Jones' colouring-book design for Gregory Doran's production instantly calls to mind the company's last big musical juggernaut. Mark Ravenhill (book,) Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers and Chris Heath's (music and lyrics) adaptation opens in a nameless English town, the setting for a family to explosively break up as a woman walks out on her husband and two young sons.

Theatre review: The Lorax

The colourful worlds and wacky rhymes of Dr. Seuss would make him seem a natural fit for stage adaptation, but his books are so short that expanding his stories to make a full-length show can't be easy without losing a lot of their charm. David Greig, though, has succeeded in giving new life to one of the writer's most heartfelt stories, as he brings a musical version of The Lorax to the Old Vic. In this expanded version of the environmental fable, the Once-ler (Simon Paisley Day) is a dreamer who travels the world hoping and failing to invent something amazing, until he stumbles upon a forest of colourful Truffula trees, that produce an incredibly soft and fluffy wool. Knitting it into a shapeless thing he calls a thneed, it becomes a must-have accessory despite nobody being quite sure what it is. He builds a thneed factory and a town supported by its economy, ignoring the warnings of the Lorax (voiced by Simon Lipkin,) a woodland creature responsible for the trees and worried about what'll happen when the Once-ler starts chopping them down.

Theatre review: Treasure Island (National Theatre)

The National Theatre goes back to the classics for this year's big family show, with a new version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Orphaned Jim Hawkins (Patsy Ferran) and her Grandma (Gillian Hanna) run an inn whose only regular customer is Bill Bones (Aidan Kelly,) an ex-pirate raving about his fear of a one-legged man. When Bones is killed with all his bills still unpaid, they take their payment from his chest, where they also find a treasure map. The excitable Squire Trelawney (Nick Fletcher) finds out about Treasure Island and is soon leading Jim and Dr Livesey (Helena Lymbery) to Bristol to find a ship and crew to take them there. Jim remains wary of the one-legged man Bones warned her of, but after all many men lose a leg at sea, the mythical pirate captain couldn't possibly be her new friend, the ship's cook Long John Silver (Arthur Darvill.)

Theatre review: The Light Princess

A lot of long-awaited projects have been finally making their way to the stage at the National this year; after the Lester/Kinnear/Hytner Othello and before the SRB/Mendes Lear, comes Tori Amos' debut as a composer of musical theatre. With Samuel Adamson she's adapted The Light Princess from a fairytale by George MacDonald. Two warring kingdoms separated by a dangerous forest, Lagobel is rich in gold but plagued by drought, a problem that, as its name suggests, Sealand doesn't have. When Princess Althea of Lagobel (Rosalie Craig) loses her mother, she deals with it by becoming unable to find anything serious again, her lightness of spirit manifesting itself literally as she starts to float. When the same thing happens to Prince Digby of Sealand (Nick Hendrix) he goes the other way and becomes a humourless warrior. When the nations' animosity finally breaks out into war, the two are pitted against each other but, of course, opposites attract.