Mickey Joe (0:00)

So here's the thing about this musical. Once I figured out what this was, I was able to have a much better time. But it's not what I was expecting it to be. Not necessarily what the show is purporting to be, but we're going to talk about it. Oh, my God. Hey, welcome back. My name is Mickey Joe and I'm obsessed with all things theater. If I seem really tired, it's because I woke up yesterday in France and then went to a gala performance in London, which is inadvisable. Right before I went to Paris for a few days to go and see a couple of musicals over there. I caught the Lightning Thief over at the Other palace, the Percy Jackson musical, of course, based on the Rick Riordan novels from the early 2000s. I keep wanting to call this Percy Jackson. I have this thing about just giving musicals human names. And I was very excited to see this because even though I did not really grow up with the Percy Jackson books, I think I was just like a little bit. I mean, I was 10 years old when they came out, so I wasn't at the wrong time for them. They just somehow passed me by. And I like mythology as well and I like young adult fantasy, so I really don't know what happened there. I also never watched the film adaptation, which I know was very controversial and people have a lot of opinions about. I did watch the recent Disney adaptation, which I'm glad I did because it familiarized me with this story. Truthfully, I don't know that much about this musical besides the fact that it originated off Broadway in an initially one act version that gained a little bit of momentum, eventually made its way to Broadway in the ill fated Broadway season that was impacted by Covid. In fact, this had opened and closed before the shutdown and sadly was not recognized at that year's reduced Tony Awards. But in part due to its source material, it has this enduring commercial viability as well as a lot of online fan support. And it has now made its way to London in a brand new production at the Other Palace Theater. And we're going to talk about it today because what I expected this musical to be is not necessarily what it is. And I think understanding what it is is key to enjoying it. Now, if you have enjoyed the Lightning Thief already at the Other Palace, I would love to hear from you in the comments section down below. I would also love to hear from anyone who has seen the previous productions of this show. Maybe you saw it on Broadway, maybe you saw it off Broadway. I'd love to know where people fall in terms of the intersection of, like, fan of the book, fan of the film, fan of the TV show, fan of this. How do all of those things overlap? Because I've heard anecdotally from a couple of people that this feels a lot closer to the book in terms of its sense of humor, which I would find very interesting. Of course, if you enjoy this review, make sure to subscribe to me right here on YouTube if that's where you're watching this video. If you are listening to me on a podcast platform, hello to you. You don't get to see how tired I am, but I think perhaps you can hear it. Make sure to follow me over there as well, where I will be sharing many more theater reviews from multiple different countries over the coming weeks. For now, though, let's talk all about the Lightning Thief, the Percy Jackson music. So what I'd love to talk about first is kind of my biggest fascination with this show, which is the source material and how we choose to adapt that both structurally and tonally. Because immediately there were red flags with this. To me, because adapting fantasy novels to the stage is a challenging thing. Doing that kind of epic fantasy on stage is a challenging thing. But you know, people are very creative, people are very innovative. There are ways around that. But my mind immediately was traveling to Lord of the Rings, which admittedly far longer than the first Percy Jackson book, but nonetheless, I worry about taking all of that action, all of those sequences and timing everything right, getting the pacing right for a fantasy novel stage musical adaptation. Now, the difference between those two probably, I mean, one of the many differences between the Lord of the Rings and the Percy Jackson books is that this musical only adapts the first book. We are only doing the Lightning Thief. Also covered, presumably in the first film, definitely what is covered within the first season of the now renewed Disney class show, in which a young boy named Percy Jackson, he is 12 years old, is expelled from another school, having been expelled from many schools previously, he finds they don't really understand him. He lives with his mother and her new boyfriend, who he doesn't get on well with because he's a repellent individual. And it's amidst these troubling circumstances that young Percy Jackson finds out his life is not quite as straightforward as he thought it was. In fact, he is a demigod, the son of a human woman and one of the legendary Greek gods, those gods being Zeus and Poseidon and Hades and Aphrodite and Athena and Dionysus, all those good ones, Hermes how could I forget Hermes? Now, when Percy's mother finds out that his life may be in danger because of this status, she sends him to Camp Half Blood, which is a refuge for other young adults and children of similar parentage, some of whom are a little resentful of their godly parents for their disinterest in them or lack of time spent with them, others of whom are very ambitious and determined to win win their favor and their pride. Percy, because of complicated circumstances around his traveling to the camp, has a slightly different attitude, where he is just a little reluctant to embrace any of it because of his life with his mother. But soon enough, he and two other friends from the camp, Annabeth and Grover, end up on a mythical quest to go and clear the name of a certain God, who he finds out is his father, and go and retrieve Zeus's lightning bolt because he is believed to be the one who has stolen it. And if you're not familiar with the story, the principal charms of it are twofold. One, this idea of all of these young people parented by the gods, which sort of naturally follows from a lot of those ancient Greek mythology stories that you would hear about the gods, just like slinging it around five Ways to Tuesday. Basically, those gods had far too much time on their hands, and a literal camp full of illegitimate children feels like the logical conclusion of that. But the other aspect is the way that the enduring existence of Greek gods and mythology ties in with contemporary New York and LA and contemporary North America. Like many of those classic stories, they encounter monsters, like Medusa, only they encounter them in the woods in New Jersey. And it's that particular sense of whimsy that this musical adaptation leans all the way into. This is, and I don't mean for this to sound insulting, a deeply unserious musical adaptation of this story. And as the first act was happening, there are several hard hitting moments. And Percy Jackson is having to reckon with a lot of personal discovery and even a little bit of trauma. But juxtaposed alongside that, there were these almost nonsensical comedic sequences. And like I said before, it's only as we entered into the second act and they were seeing a particular song about being lost in the woods in the middle of New Jersey that I realized, oh, this whole thing is light hearted and quirky and whimsical and silly and fun. But if we take the Harry Potter franchise as an example, it's transphobic, author notwithstanding, then what you have is the film adaptation, which takes the whole thing very seriously. And also the Star kid musical version of it, a very Potter musical which essentially parodies the show and its plot and its characters and does something very silly and tongue in cheek with it. It's basically a skit. And this, for much of its duration, feels not dissimilar to that kind of a show. It feels on occasion like a Percy Jackson parody musical. And that's the thing that surprised me because I really thought this was going to take the story entirely seriously. But then I was told by people that the comedy of this lives tonally a lot closer to the book and is very familiar of that. And I also think that young audiences, like, if you're 12 years old and you're going to see this story about semi mythical 12 year olds and it's this funny and it's this silly and it's a little bit like Horrible Histories esque, I guess you're probably going to have a great time with it. And comedy is good. I'm certainly not anti comedy. And some of those moments, especially when we really lean into it in the second act and we all work out where we are, they're really funny. But it does inhibit the show's ability in the same duration to be serious and to be quite as dramatically compelling. And there are serious things that happen at the very start and at the very end of this with near fatal consequences which, you know, we can't invest all the way in because the show tonally has otherwise been so light hearted. When you have a character like Medusa, for example, play sensationally by Paisley Billings, who is played for laughs, who is this sassy, indignant monster Persona who comes on, it's all a big comedy scene, then we don't feel the threat of that in the same way. And when you have two characters entering into this sort of Shakespearean esque feud, harkening back to old grudges and resentments and losses and then having a sword fight and like one of them brushes the other one on the small of their back, then again, we just can't really take it seriously. We don't feel the immediacy of that threat and that danger because it's been such a silly show. And if that's what the writers of this show, those writers being the composer Rob Robecki and the book writer Joe Trace were going for, then that's great. But I feel like it's the difference between really appealing to the Lightning Thief demographic and those young fans and those young adult fans and having a broader appeal that will also be enjoyed by adults. My other reservation about this being the marketing and the fact that it makes it seem like this is going to be a legitimate, serious adaptation. And I guess if we do go back to the book and the book has that same kind of comedy, then it is in a way. But it does feel tonally very apart from the screen adaptations that we've seen and all of the artwork. A lot of the footage that they've put together to announce and promote this show has been very brooding, has been Percy Jackson staring out to sea, has been this image with him holding the sword. And it's so much less serious than that. It's so deeply unserious. Now the other thing I wanted to talk about was the structure and the pacing because as we headed towards the interval, I was very aware that we'd only covered the same ground traversed within the first couple episodes of the TV series. There's a lot of exposition that needs to happen here. We meet Percy Jackson in the real world. He finds out about the existence of all of these gods and the implications for him at the same time as we do as an audience. He then travels to this camp where he meets a lot of different supporting characters, all of whom need to be established. That is key. And then there follows a necessity of events that unfolds there in order to launch him and his friends, whose relationships need to be be established, into this quest. All of this is just the first act, perhaps because the tone was so light hearted and because they also skip out a couple of sections like the time spent in the. Like the Lotus Casino or hotel or whatever it's called. The thing moves at a pace that actually works. And the second act just containing this quest sequence makes it a compelling second act. It's probably a stronger act than the first. So I was. I was pleasantly surprised by how functional that was. The only thing that didn't really work for me was the epilogue sequence because once again we ventured back to this very serious place. And then, you know, it's kind of a cliffhanger, which is a weird thing in a standalone musical to say, like, oh, this has been unleashed and this is now what's going to happen next. But it's not a musical series because that's not a concept we've ever really explored or that necessarily works. Sequels and musicals, different conversation. But they also give you just about a conclusive enough song to kind of justify all that, where they're singing this refrain of bring on the monsters. And it's more about the journey that they've all gone on to get to this moment. And that's been the focus of the story. Now let's talk about the creative choices made in bringing this to the stage, as well as the material by Rob Rabiki and Joe Trace. I enjoy the book, that is to say, the script adaptation of Rick Riordan's novel. It's very juvenile and adolescent, but in a way that works in a way that feels appropriate for this story. Again, gears towards young audiences. And I'd say the same thing for Rober's score as well. It's fun, it's lively. Lost at the start of the second act is one of my favorite songs because that has a lot of whimsy to it. The whole thing lives in this very poppy, contemporary kind of kidz boppy realm. And I would like for it to have moments where it touches on the more epic. I would like for there to be a little bit more of a shift in identity from Percy Jackson's life before finding out about all of this to when he goes to the camp. But the clearest voice that comes through, again, is this sense of adolescence, because it's these campfire songs being sung by these resentful teens who have complicated feelings about their parents. So they're also going to feel like angsty young people songs. I think I just want musically for there to be this other side to it, this other realm that we can hear indicated by a different musical style. This new production of the show has been directed by Lizzie G. The set and costume design are by Ryan Dawson Layt. I really like the costuming. And again, it's the thing. I got to understand it more as we were going on. The way that which is, like, improvised, rising these monsters out of these props and set pieces. It's all a little bit threadbare and a little bit pulled together. It feels not unlike, aesthetically, a really great student production of the Lightning Thief that feels very creative and very innovative. It just doesn't necessarily all of it look super high budget. I do like the playing space that they have created, and I think it does very well to allow us to go to a bunch of different locations and allow us to be journeying across North America. It's a hard task that this show has, but in both the design and the direction, there is this silliness, this comedy that keeps creeping into the thing when, you know, you have the arrival of Poseidon as a God, for example, being complimented by bubble machines, and he's wearing swimming trunks and a tropical, like, a beach shirt that's open and he's got, like, surfer Hair, again, taking it minimally seriously. There's also, if I'm being honest, a little bit of a discrepancy between the effectiveness of certain mythological costumes. Medusa's snake head. I just think we just need more snakes. We simply just needed more snakes. I like Grover's revealed goat legs. If you don't know. Grover is a character who is a descendant of Pan. Percy initially knows him in the human realm where we see him with like normal person legs. And then when he meets him again at Camp Half Blood, he then sees him with goat legs. Those look great. Loved the goat legs. The issue I have is the horse legs. We meet another character who is a centaur, which is to say half human, half horse. Specifically the top half torso, upwards human, bottom half horse. And listen, not to be a purist about it, but there is a long held theatrical tradition of the pantomime horse achievable really only via two people. This is one person in a horse costume and they just have the two horse legs which look like the goat legs, but the way they differentiate this, they make them a little less fluffy. He, unlike Grover, doesn't look like he could be selling toilet paper as some kind of a mascot. What he has instead is a big old horse butt. He could be the Kardashian of horses. And I can't believe I'm saying this in a full theatrical review, but a BBL does not a horse make on stage. Like, I just, I feel I don't know how. I don't know what the answer would have been had you put wheels on the back legs and he's constantly like dragging them around with him. It just wasn't giving horse to me, it was giving goat with a bbl. And that's literally all I could keep thinking about. And I'd say I am similarly about half and half on a lot of the other costume design as well. I liked Ares costume design. I thought that looks cool. And Hades, I thought again, could have just been pushed a little further, could have been a little more dramatic. He's one of the more high profile gods that we meet in the thing and of the monsters we encounter. I like the way that we represent a minotaur with various members of the company holding up these different lit cages to show the eyes and the horns and we feel the danger and the scale of that. And that's the kind of creativity that I love to see on stage. I would rather we made really innovative choices than having a lot of money to spend. There is one particular staging choice that I enjoy where we have this upper section, this sort of a circular portal with a translucent cover so that we can light from behind in certain ways to reveal things. They reveal an oracle character here and they show a flashback to a traumatic incident in the past with another character who is introduced to us during that sequence. And of the direction, I would only say the same things I've already said about the show itself. We do feel very tonally confused in the first act as to whether this is meant to be moving and, you know, affecting, or whether it's meant to be charmingly insincere. Once we get into the second, that's understood a little bit better. But pacing wise, I think it's super impressive. We do this really diligent amount of exposition in the beginning that doesn't feel overextended, and then the second act manages to cover an awful lot of ground without feeling like it's concerted haste. Anyway, let's talk about the performers bringing these book characters to life on stage. So Percy Jackson is played by the very talented Max Harwood, perhaps best known to audiences for having played the role of Jamie New in the feature film adaptation of the British musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie. Since then, Max has appeared in the original West End cast of Stranger Things, the First Shadow, but is now returning to the world of musical theater playing Percy Jackson. And I'm glad he is, because he has a fantastic voice. Great for this kind of music as well. Very contemporary, very fluid. He has a couple of angsty solo musical numbers that he gets to do. This is probably the closest that we get to real moments of depth and sincerity within the show. And I think his characterization of Percy Jackson really works as well. He is evidently not 12 years old, none of them are. But he seems to get this quirky comedic world in which the show lives, giving you this nasal, slightly, slightly dorky, slightly dweeby thing that he's going for, which is way more interesting to me than just like generic hero, young adult protagonist. The fact that he says and does things that are constantly embarrassing himself, and the fact that he's figuring all of it out. And he is very adolescent and he feels a little oblivious to a lot of things. That really works for me. Now, Grover, the one with the goat legs, is played by Scott Folham, returning to the other palace where he starred in Be More Chill as Jeremy here a few years ago. And he will always be able to deliver a very convincing, squeaky voiced team that is very much at his fingertips. And I like the characterization he Delivers here as well. There's a real charm around, especially when we get to meet him properly revealed with the goat legs. That's very funny. We get a slightly different quality from Jessica Lee as Annabeth. This is a very popular fan favorite character. I'm given to understand she is a daughter of Athena, something of a perfectionist, and she is determined to be the best and to be wise enough and to be courageous enough to make her mother proud. As such, she sets herself these impossibly high standards, but her and Percy warm to each other. There's even a romantic inclination. It seems by the end of the stage musical between these two characters. This performance reminded me how talented Jessica Lee is. This is not my first time seeing her on stage. I don't know if she feels quite as adolescent as some of the others. And it's a tricky one to get right because Annabeth is still young, but she is also old beyond her years, so trying to play that on stage is difficult. I also think she's giving you the serious adaptation of the Lightning Thief, which this isn't. Now we have some standout supporting performances I need to talk about as well. Paisley Billings steals several scenes of this show. I'm not all the way convinced about her performance as Percy's mother at the beginning. I just don't know that she feels like she reads old enough on stage to be appropriately maternal. We never fully buy that relationship. And that relationship is the catalyst of the entire thing. For Percy, it's the reason he agrees to go on the quest. It's his driving force and character motivation. And I just. I feel like Paisley is a little miscast in this character specifically. But every time we meet her as someone else, as we meet her as the receptionist to the underworld who is working on her music career and insists on performing a song as we meet her as Medusa, as the oracle, winning, brilliant, over the top characterizations. Jo Allen is also dialing the energy all the way up playing Mr. D and other characters. Mr. D is revealed to be the God Dionysus once we reach Camp Half Blood. And this I have mixed feelings about, just because this is the first, like, overblown comedy character that we encounter in what has up to that point been a largely serious musical. So this is where we start to feel the tonal whiplash. Alongside him, you have Greg Barnett, who plays several characters, who plays most of the gods, who also plays the half horse gentleman I was telling you about before with the Kardashian features. And let me tell you, this man commits wholeheartedly to everything that he has to do in this show, moments of which are very profound. Other moments of which are so silly. He gives a sort of campy panto villain in this kind of a glam rock aesthetic. He gives us himbo surfer dude, Poseidon. And it is the nature of these characters that undermines the ability of any of these moments to be played with any kind of seriousness. But like I said, committed wholeheartedly to the bit. And that, I think, is what those moments need ultimately. Finally, Joaquin Pedro Valdez playing multiple characters, but particularly playing Luke and also Ares. Very charming, very winning in both of those roles. Not unlike Jessica. His Luke could also live in a more serious version of this show. That's just giving you the fantasy epic thing, but that's also, I think, because neither of them really have the space within the material of those characters to to take it to that comedic place. There's not a lot to parody with those two. With Aries, meanwhile, he's able to have a lot more fun. And it is fun. The whole thing is very fun. But I think vital to enjoying it is understanding that this isn't the most serious, the most sincere adaptation of the Percy Jackson stories that you have ever seen before. The Lightning Thief musical is a quirky, charming, slightly juvenile, slightly threadbare, but legitimately funny show. And if that's you, and if you've already seen it, like I said, I would love to hear what you think. Those are all of my thoughts about the Lightning Thief musical. You can find it right now at the other Palace Theatre in London. If you've seen it already, tell us what you thought in the comments down below. In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed this review. Stay tuned for many more coming very soon. Make sure you're following me, make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss any of my upcoming theatrical coverage. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Joe Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. 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