“Is this bear an endangered species?” asks Tarinn Callender as the hapless helper of Victoria Hamilton-Barritt’s (very) arch-villainess Millicent Price. With growling glee as insanely delicious as it is malicious, she retorts, “It is now.” Price is absolutely right about the trapped-in-peril titular character she wants to stuff, but about the show as a whole she couldn’t be more wrong. Furry, funny and fully-formed, the much-anticipated “Paddington” musical has finally arrived in the West End and it’s alive not only with joy but that vanishingly rare theatrical quality: completely beguiling charm.
Adapting beloved intellectual property to the stage is a risky business. For every long-running “The Lion King” and “Wicked” there’s an “Interview With A Vampire”, “Groundhog Day” or London’s current, depressingly flaccid “The Hunger Games.” But hopes were lifted for producers Sonia Friedman and Eliza Lumley’s stage presentation by the fact that the film versions of Michael Bond’s original 1958 story collection “A Bear Called Paddington” (and fourteen sequels) were vastly stronger than anyone foresaw, amassing a box-office total approaching $800 million and counting.
At least five years in gestation with multiple developmental workshops along the way, the result could have felt flatly cynical. But from the opening moments, set in the cozy cabinet of curiosities shop — cue orchestrator/arranger Matt Brind’s mysterious and twinkling Danny Elfman-esque underscoring — there’s real precision to Luke Sheppard’s production. From the storybook design right through the entire cast, the show never feels engineered.
