Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic) (1:17)

I fear if you were to go back and look at things like the web series submissions only and look at the musicals that they created as punchlines. The material for those would actually be more sophisticated than some of the film to stage adaptations we have seen in the years since. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theatre. I am a theatre critic and content creator here on social media and last week I saw the UK professional premiere of the musical adaptation of Freaky Friday at Home Theatre in Manchester on what perhaps turned out to be a misguided Saturday afternoon. Even though the show is just now arriving in the UK and with great timing, not that long after the release of the sequel film Freaky A Friday. It actually premiered several years ago for the first time in the US and was subsequently turned into a musical film for Disney Channel. But it has largely stayed off my radar until now and there are a lot of curious things for us to discuss about the stage adaptation of Freaky Friday. Perhaps some assumptions you might have about it that might not actually be correct. We're going to talk about the material, the choices that they've made in this adaptation, as well as the performances of the UK cast. Now, if you have seen any version of Freaky Friday previously, I would love to know your thoughts in the comments section down below. And if you enjoy listening to what I have to say, as always, always make sure you're subscribed here on YouTube or following me on podcast platforms. But for now, let's just embark. Let's talk about the out of body experience that I had as an audience member at Freaky Friday. So here is the thing about Freaky Friday the musical. It is not based on the best known of the various film adaptations of the book. It is based on the concept of the book, but not really. From what I can tell, that's strictly on the book itself. The book having been written in 1972, having been adapted for screen three times, most notably in the early to mid 2000s with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, that being the version that has recently received a sequel set one entire generation later. And actually, here's a fun piece of theatrical trivia for you. The original novel was written by Mary Rogers, the composer of the musical Once Upon a Mattress, the daughter of Richard Rogers, the mother of Adam Gett, and I guess not unlike the Curious Case of Benjamin Button musical written by Jethro Compton and Darren Clark. This pretty much just extrapolates the idea of a mother and daughter switching bodies with some familiar elements from a couple of the film adaptations, like the fact that the mother is about to have a wedding the next day on the Saturday after the Freaky Friday and the guy that she's getting married to is not necessarily welcomed into the family by the teenage daughter who is still grieving the loss of her father a few years ago. She has a younger brother who she finds annoying, and as a teenager, slightly aged up from the 13 year old daughter in the original story, she has a rebellious free spirit streak which her perhaps uptight controlling mother finds to be irritating. In any case, the key story here is the same that you get introduced to their life and their dynamic. You find out that there is considerable friction between them and after a heated argument the two of them find themselves having mysteriously and inexplicably switched bodies, whereupon they have to walk a mile in each other's shoes. So to spe by fulfilling the everyday tasks of each other's lives, with the mother having to go to her daughter's school in her daughter's body and navigate the complicated social circle there, and the daughter having to get everything ready for the mother's wedding the next day, which she happens also to be catering and organizing herself. And as is always the way, the experience lends both of them a certain amount of perspective. Ellie, the daughter, learned that her little brother, who she thinks is annoying and despises her, actually looks up to her more than he cares to admit. She is also able, though she is determinedly keeping him at an arm's length in terms of any romantic contact, able to forge a more substantial connection and find an understanding with her new stepfather to be her mother. Catherine, meanwhile, eventually has a realization of her own as she recalls the joy of chaotic youth that she hasn't felt in such a long time. And it's perhaps for each of them, not as substantial revelation as the ones that we've seen them experience on screen. But there are a handful of reasons for this, I think, think. And not only is it a little jarring for audiences expecting this to be a direct adaptation of the film, but also I think it sort of inhibits its own ability to land a really emotionally meaningful and connecting conclusion. For starters, the narrative no longer begins the day before on the Thursday, so we don't have this run up into it, where we really get to see their relationship from multiple angles and all of the different things that they are struggling with. We have this brief little introduction where they're getting ready in the morning and it's set that same day. Oh, and this is after I should point out a framing device in which Ellie the. Is her name Ellie. I keep forgetting these characters names. Ellie. The daughter's name is Ellie. The mother's name is Catherine. Ellie begins the show by arriving on stage and telling us, the audience, about this thing that happened in the past. And we're never going to believe it, which is a line that gets repeated at the end and never really lands for me, because it's not, as you know, and as we all know, an adaptation of a true story. But even stranger is that her mother, Catherine, joins her for this introductory moment as we are framing the story to be told and the two of them are still bickering. And the entire concept of Freaky Friday, which probably the majority of the adults in the audience know before coming to see the show, is that the two of them are fighting. They switch bodies, they learn about each other's lives, and they thereafter get along better, they reach a place of understanding. And there can still be, like, little tensions and frustrations, but for them to still be, like, fighting and being like, ugh, mom, you always do this. It sort of feels like, well, if that's happening in the future and we're looking at this Freaky Friday that happened in the rear view mirror, and clearly it didn't achieve all that much. Like, you could put in some dialogue about, like, remember how we used to drive each other insane? And then, like, the littlest bit of lingering. Like, yeah, that definitely doesn't still happen anymore, but in a fond way. And they don't quite all the way get to that. This, aside from the fact that I don't think we need a framing device whatsoever, you can just start the show. You can just tell us the story. That, to me, feels like writing that didn't know how to begin this thing. And it's what keeps it feeling honestly like a Disney Channel movie rather than a sophisticated stage musical. That, along with the fact that we begin on the morning of the day and we have to really rush through this introduction and the actual circumstances of their body switch is no longer their confrontation being overheard and a curse being placed on them, as per the 2003 film, but instead, Ellie is wielding this comically oversized hourglass, which it transpires is magical, with her mother grabbing the other side of it in the midst of an argument as they announce that they hate each other before it is thrown to the floor and broken. And with that, the magical exchange has taken place. And they're like, oh, no, not the magic hourglass that my late father gave to us, with them each having one, only the mother has sold hers. And to be completely honest, late husband or not. Looking at the vibe of this woman's home, I think it's entirely reasonable that you don't keep the second comically oversized giant hourglass. Like, I don't mind a little one. You could use it to play board games, but these things are so huge, they could start talking to you in a touring production of Beauty and the Beast. Anyway, there are a couple of other differences from the version of the story that you might know. Ellie is no longer an aspiring musician. And truthfully, she doesn't really have any kind of passion or enthusiasm for an activity beyond a mass scavenger hunt organized by the students at her school, which is this notorious yearly tradition. Only it coincides with the rehearsal dinner for her mother's wedding the next day, a wedding that she isn't thrilled about. So, you know, the entire day is already not going her way before she becomes her own mother, which I think we can all agree is something of a curveball to experience.

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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic) (9:51)

It's before lunch. Now. This show has a book written by Bridget Carpenter with music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkie. Yes, you heard me correctly, the composer and lyricist of the musical Next to Normal. And there is this passing resemblance if you squint at it. One of the earliest songs in that show being the sort of family introductory song as they're getting ready, called Just Another Day, this one has a similar song in a similar place where they're singing Just One Day, probably one of the strongest songs in the score. Generally speaking, the material of merit that there is in this show is sort of struggling against the worst material by which it is surrounded. And by and large, it is the score from Tom Kitt, which is the redeeming quality of the Thing more so than the book. But I can't say that I was all the way in love with all of the lyrics necessarily. And if we take a look at this early number Just One Day as an example of that, I like the melody of the thing where it's like. And you can almost hear the next normal of it all just starting to creep in there and this slightly edgy quality and what is otherwise an incredibly bubblegum kind of adolescent juvenile show. Tonally, it is a curiously difficult sing, and Heidi Blickenstaff, I believe, originated the role of the mother played in this production brilliantly by Rebecca Locke. And I say curious because it feels as though the inevitable outcome of this production, it doesn't really make sense to do in schools because the whole point is the intergenerational dynamic. And while it would be funny to have, you know, two students of the same age playing mother and daughter and then swapping bodies, it feels like a show that is destined for regional theaters or community theater groups only. This song Alone. Already a really difficult sing. But let's talk about the lyrics. And Ellie is singing, Just one day. That's all I need. Just a day without her nagging. Just one day. I beg, I plead, but the drag just keeps on dragging. And I can write a lyric like that off because it's a teenage character. The problem that I have is with the line that comes immediately afterwards because it's so painfully on the nose. It's the kind of lyric that makes my eyes roll all the way into the back of my skull, at which point I can't see anything that's happening on stage. But she sings, while I wish for just one Monday or a Friday to be free. And I hate it. I hate it so much. I'm so sorry. And if you really want to say Friday in there, if it's important for you to get that in there within the first 20 seconds of singing in this number, then you could at least do something like, have it be like the third option. Like, it would be admittedly worse to be like, if only I could be free for, I don't know, a Friday. Which is almost what this lyric is. You could have it be like. Like a Monday or a Wednesday or a Friday by myself, something like that. Or like, there's enough syllables in the line that you could say just a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday by myself. And then she's saying a different thing because then she's asking for five consecutive days. But you get what I mean. It is that thing of being like, God, I wish I could just have. Have a Friday. That's, to me, what makes this feel like those parody musicals, those little Saturday Night Live style skits based on films where you would have some kind of a clunky title song that would have the name of it, and you would have a song be introduced by a line like that. And even just trying to foist the title of the movie into a song somewhere in the show is something I feel like I've complained about for a really long time. Legally Blonde just about gets away with it. But it is the example I use when I'm joking about this. Because the entire meaning of Legally Blonde, and this being the insult that Callahan calls earlier in the show, disappears because it sounds, for all intents and purposes, like she may as well be singing like, that's fine with me. Just let me be Shrek the musical. Like, it just. It's. You're so aware that she's singing the title. And it's that thing of, like, the slightly cringy quality of the title of the film or the play being said within it as well. And I fear just generally, especially where songwriting is concerned, a lot of the new musical adaptations of popular films that we're seeing on stage are starting to resemble those little versions that were created as jokes. Like the fake Mean Girls musical from Submissions Only is really not that far in quality from the actual Mean Girls musical that was developed for the stage a few years later. And the song Nobody Does Mean Like Me is not that far apart from the likes of Revenge Party. Meanwhile, you have Freaky Friday watering down this actually worthwhile story about intergenerational reconnection and seeing your own family dynamic in your own life through the perspective of another person into something that has become really juvenile and basic, robbing its characters of a rewarding lesson to learn any more substantial than, huh? Maybe I should just chill out a little bit once in a while. And also, what do you mean you're still upset your father died while you were a teenager? It's been three whole years. You're not over that yet. And I want to move past this introductory song because there are objectively worse lyrics in the show. As in many previous versions of the Freaky Friday story, Ellie has a crush on a boy at her school. He is. And I want to get this right, because it feels important to the list master, which means that he is in charge of the list of items that people have to find in the hunt, which is the scavenger hunt. Oh, my God, There's a song about this as well. I forgot this happened. This is in the second act, and it's one of those musical numbers that is interrupted by dialogue and moves us through various different scenes at a pace. And everything is building in terms of dramatic goings on. And his character, his name, I want to call him Elton, because that's what he was called in the not dissimilar Clueless the musical, but he's not called that in this. He has some kind of a generic name. He's like a Ben or a Mat. Honestly, it doesn't really matter. He's played by Max Merza. Adam. There you go. The first man, no less. And this actually, as it goes, is not a bad song. My issue with it is it just kept coming back and we kept playing a little bit more of a scene, and then he kept coming back on stage to be like, like, hey, hunters. And, like, start singing the song again. And it felt like a full eight minutes later when he was still coming back on and there were like, more Modulations. I was like, oh, that was a long part of dialogue. We're still in the song. We haven't left the song yet. It's like we've been driving through this act for 25 minutes. What do you mean we're still in this song? What do you mean we haven't left Chicago yet? So confused. And also not the worst song he sings in the show because he meets Ellie's younger brother Fletcher, who is a keen puppeteer and honestly, been there. That's what my childhood looked like too. Only my older sister thought it was very cool. Anyway, he is at a bus stop trying to run away because his mother has broken his spirit. On the car journey home after she picked him up, his mother, who was actually his sister. We'll talk about that scene in just a moment. But not Elton. Adam sings to him in this moment a song about how women and sandwiches are very similar, this being his particular worldview. And it was honestly bad enough as a line of dialogue when he said women are a lot like savages. When that then ushered in a song, I thought, oh, no. And it gets across quickly enough. The, I guess, charm of him being this well meaning and ultimately big hearted but perhaps slightly vacuous teenage boy. Back to the scene in the car with Ellie in her mother's body and her brother. She has that same thing that we've seen before, which is actually, I think, one of the most impactful emotional moments of the Freaky Friday story. When she hears from her brother, who doesn't realize he's talking to his sister, how much he likes her and how cool he thinks she is. And you can see that affect her. What's sort of disorientating is in the Lindsay Lohan Jamie Lee Curtis film, you see that be one of the things that starts to affect her resolve and starts to sort of reposition her in a different direction, in a different way of thinking. And that begins to change her mind a little bit. But in the musical, what follows immediately afterwards is this very high belting song which Rebecca Locke delivers like a Home Run, in which she tells him about how parents lie. And it's a shame because even though she plays the moment of recognition when she hears what he has to say about her, that happening immediately afterwards sort of suggests to us that it didn't really impact her all that much, which I think is disappointing. That's one of the key emotional beats that we kind of just skip over in this production by Andy Fickman. Andy Fickman, who directed another of this year's Slightly lacking screen to stage musical adaptations. 13 going on 30. That being another one that is very guilty of a clunky title song. I'm 13, 13, 13 going on 30, 30, 30 going on. And while this show doesn't have a song that's like, we're having a Freaky Friday, we're having a Yours and My Day or something to that effect, it really wouldn out of place if it did. And I enjoy Andy Fickman's work on Heather's. I think that straddles the campy slash dark comedy tone well enough. And when the material doesn't have any kind of subversive quality to push up against, it kind of feels more like what he's doing is like, admittedly very slick directing. We move through these scenes at a decent enough pace and the hypersaturated characterization is all there. We understand this world and there's an undeniable entertainment factor. And the whole thing hopes to, by the end of it, have found a certain quantity of charm. But we're just missing the emotional release of these moments. You long to be able to bring the whole thing to a halt and shake these characters and really find some sense of emotional connection from the audience. It's starting to feel like what Andy is creating on stage is the equivalent of children's shows, but for grown ups, where they're displaying well enough the emotions that they're feeling and they're singing about those emotions but we're not feeling that really stir anything in us. Oh, my gosh, I forgot. This happened to me during the first act as well. It's very possible my mind is just in the gutter and that I'm really the problem here. But there was a moment during the song. I think it's during I Got this, which is a sort of a fun bossa nova that I actually quite enjoyed and is one of about four bossa novas I've heard in the last two weeks. I don't know how this keeps happening to me, but it's a fun song. It's like, I got this, I got this, I got this. Not sophisticated lyrics, but it's fun enough. There's a moment where that's being sung at the high school and there's this mean girl type character who looks a lot like Cher from Clueless, and she's singing about how she's going to win the scavenger hunt. And she sings to Ellie in this kind of bullying way. I'm going to be like King of the Hunt. Look at you. You're just a Grunt. Not where I thought that lyric was going. And I was like, oh, that was a bit of. Didn't know where we were going with that one, but that's fine. Moments later in the song, oh, biology, what have you done to me? Which is bear in mind the adult mother of this teenager in her daughter's body singing about the hormonal attraction that she is experiencing to Adam, which is never really played as fully or as wittily as it is in the film with Chad Michael Murray and Jamie Lee Curtis, with the awkwardness of. Of that the whole age divide, bizarre romantic connection because it's actually her teenage daughter that continuing to be a great joke in the second film that they call back to. We never really get that to the same extent in the musical. But anyway, having heard the you're just a grunt lyric, she sings something about him standing next to her and only a few minutes have passed. I want you to bear that in mind. When she sings, it's kingdom, phylum, class, and then it's order, family, genus. When he leans over my shoulder there in all his long and leanness, and once again I was like, what's about to rhyme with genus? And then of course, why wouldn't it be leanness? I start silently but hysterically laughing to myself because I'm like, I can't believe that's just happened to me twice. And it starts to feel like it's deliberate. This is a whole conspiracy theorist moment from me right here. But how? How did that happen to me two separate times? Anyway, I think enough has been said about the material and the creative choices. Let us talk about the redeeming factor of the whole thing, which is these plot before.

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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic) (22:45)

So at this point, I will travel anywhere in the country, perhaps the world, to see Rebecca Locke on stage. She has utterly come into, I think, the best years of her career. And long before she was announced for this, she was, to my mind, the only person who could play this role because she can capture that rambunctious, youthful quality and she's played roles before where she's been able to deliver that kind of zany adolescent humor while, you know, looking like the traditional mother, albeit in a really horribly styled wig. I have such issues with this wig that she was wearing also. Why doesn't she get, like a fun makeover moment that Jamie Lee Curtis has in the film? I think if there was something visually for us to be able to connect to in terms of, like, each of them being the ages that they are, but dressing each other in the way that they consider to be fun. The problem is they've already started their days when the switch happens. So all that Jenna Pandya can do is put her hair up and Becky Locke can't really do anything other than go about her day in this flat flat, slightly too far back on her head wig. And she's also having just come off of the Here and Now UK tour, the Steps musical. I think in the vocal prime of her life as well. She sounds so, so great, belting the highest parts of this score. She probably is one of the vocalists we have over here in the uk, most comparable to Heidi Blickenstaff, vocal powerhouse. There were a number of moments where I was able to disengage from disappointment in the material because of how well Becky Locke was singing it. She is formidable. She is perfect for a role like this. But then that also sort of breeds its own new disappointment because you want for her to have material closer to the stuff that Jamie Lee Curtis had to play in the film. And she's very much like the stage answer to a Jamie Lee Curtis type. So for it to be a very different character is kind of dissatisfying. And it's the fact that she never really gets to have fun while inhabiting her mother's body as a teenager, she just tries to do this interview and accidentally wrecks a wedding cake and is trying to organize things and has to go and pick up her brother. It's kind of a drag the entire time. And like I said, no slightly questionable flirtation with Adam, because instead, whenever she has a conversation with him, she is reduced to giggling and can't really maintain the thing. And he just finds it weird. He actually. Max, I think, is a really exciting new talent who seems to be relegated to a lot of these kind of derivative musicals. I long for someone to cast this guy in slightly better material where he isn't playing exactly the same kind of character every single time. Then we have Jenna Pandia as Ellie, but for the majority of the show playing her mother, Catherine, in Ellie's body. And I think this is sort of less convincing than Rebecca Locke playing the teenage version of herself. And it's tricky, especially because they don't have that much of a visual transformation where they sort of style themselves as an adult and a teenager in the wrong body, which would help us recall where we are. There are several moments when Ellie is at school and I forget that we're meant to be looking at an adult in a teenager's body. I don't forget that when I'm seeing Becky Locke playing sort of the chaos in the kitchen and the unprofessional conduct in the interview and like fleeing from the attempt at a kiss from her fiance and trying to parent the son who is actually her brother. All of that stuff with Jenna as Ellie, she starts to just feel like a slightly more precocious teen. And it's tricky because I think you could probably have said the same thing of Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. And I want for there to be more in the material that really plays up her being just this older soul in the wrong environment. It's also perhaps even a little unfair and one sided that we see Ellie as her mother struggling as much as she is while what they're doing at school for Catherine as her daughter is dissecting a frog. And she's a master chef, so she's really good at it and everyone finds it super impressive. What she struggles with is the gym class, which I think we find out that Ellie was failing anyway or failed separately, which is why she has to go to summer school. But there's something quite satisfying again in the Lindsay Lohan film with her discovering that the reason why she's not getting on with this particular teacher nature is because he's still resentful that he was rejected by her mother, which of course when her mother goes in in her daughter's body, she then recognizes and realizes and calls him out on. There's no kind of a moment like that for Catherine as Ellie in the show and for her to be able to ultimately kind of thrive in a teenage world while Ellie still struggles to as her mother does feel a little bit like a one sided version of the story story and like it's suggesting Ellie has something way more substantial to learn than her mother who basically just needed to chill a little bit. And I applaud the efforts of the hard working cast. There is more that we can say about this show and these performances. And I liked the set design, even if it was a little bit on the nose. Almost every detail of this, from the characterizations to the creative choices feels, if not a little bit sort of new musical theatre generic, then a little bit it. Like, like I said, an adult version of a kids show where we're finding very little depth or reason to really get invested. That being said, that may not be what you're looking for whatsoever in a Freaky Friday musical adaptation. And there are some bops in this score, there are strong performances, there are great vocals. I don't think it really lives up to the quality of the film. If that storyline is what you are expecting, then it is perhaps also a disorientating watch. There are a couple moments of jarringly bad dialogue, but if you go in maybe with a low enough expectation, there perhaps also a sufficient level of entertainment quality that you could have a nice time. Very possibly I am alone in being as harsh as I am about this show. I would love to hear what other people have thought if they have been to see it. If you have seen Freaky Friday at home, Manchester, or previously elsewhere, then let us all know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. Particularly if you disagree with me. Particularly if you enjoyed it, let us know why. In the meantime, those have been my thoughts. If you would like to hear more reviews from me, make sure that you that you're subscribed or following me on podcast platforms. And as always, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.

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