Christmas had an early start in Wolverhampton with Elf The Musical hitting the city as part of a national tour.
What is Elf The Musical?
Elf The Musical is based of the hit film ‘Elf’ (2003) which starred Will Ferrell as character ‘Buddy’. The overall premise of the film is ‘Buddy’ accidentally gets into Santa’s sack leaving him to be raised by fellow elves. However he is later told that he is not an Elf so he begins his journey to find his real family in New York. From there a spiral of things happen such as disappointments of ‘real life’ with his family, as well as gaining a girlfriend who is noticeably opposite to how his character behaves.
Despite this film being a classic, composer Matthew Sklar decided to create a musical based on the classic Christmas film with its Broadway debut on November 14th 2010. Since then the success of the musical debut has been seen in West End as well as extensive tours around the UK, United States, Internationally and Australia.
Starting an early Christmas in Wolverhampton
On the 13th of November, I watched ‘Elf The Musical’ more out of curiosity as to how it would play out since I have heard of the musical but it was not one of my top ones to see.
Starting off the show we are warmed up through pantomime like warmups and not long after a lucky few received large inflated snowballs and smaller snowballs that the audience were told to throw at a certain point at the show. This was a fun section in the show even when a lot of the audience threw them in scenes they weren’t supposed to.
The stage is lit with what appears to be Santa’s workshop featuring a projection for ambiance. However my issue with this projection was it was distracting a made less impressive by the choice of videos in the background, for example at many points Santa and gingerbread men where doing a famous dance ‘Gangman Style’ or same clips being repeated. For children this could be seen as impressive or even unnoticeable, however I saw it looking a bit lazy and a wasted chance to fully use the projectors.
Jordan Conway as ‘Buddy’
When we were introduced to ‘Buddy’ played by Jordan Conway (this is his second year playing this role) it was evident that they picked a strong, confident actor that loved the role that he was depicting. Conway was able to recover from many mistakes that he faced by actually making it more comedic through improvisation.
Mistakes that started to arrive were missed queues such as when ‘Buddy’ screams into a microphone at ‘Gimbels’ when Santa is announced to be ‘coming to town’ by the shop owner. Conway missed his queue into the microphone but continued the section with improvisation by changing dialogue to fit the scene and also pushing past the laughter with his fellow actor.
Circus act?
I also noticed that in the promotion for this musical there was noticeable circus acts which they ended up not doing in the show at all apart from Santas sleigh at the end (but I would not class that as circus performance). This gave me the impression that they went under a couple of technical maybe safety issues but to the company’s credit it was not noticeable until after I did research on the performance. With circus acts most likely going to be interesting for the audience I don’t feel like the musical needs circus blended into it, if anything it would have made the show more messy in this case for the story line.
The songs throughout the show were quite catchy but not really ‘breathtaking’. I do agree however that these songs are perfect for bringing children into the Christmas spirit with its aim to engage the audience definitely worked in Wolverhampton.
Lastly the company didn’t do any form of bows at the end of the show which I found unusual for any play or musical as it is almost expected like a tradition to signify the end of a performance.
Final thoughts
My overall opinion on this musical is that I personally would not watch again (it was definitely a one time watch) but that may be because I am not the target audience for this musical. For kids the show is bright, bubbly and enjoyable with quirky jokes and decent sets to highlight the actors performances.
Performance overall was impressive I just feel as if something is missing in the musical as if the adaptation fell a bit flat from the original that made it famous in the first place.