26 – 29 January 2022

This is a tremendously entertaining show. Directed with great flair by Candice Edmunds, it has a strong story, an excellent cast, jaw-dropping visual effects, colourful dance numbers, a twelve-piece orchestra and lots of fast-paced action. There’s also some very clever puppetry and an underwater sequence with a rather splendid talking fish. In other words, it’s got just about everything that one could want from a family-friendly musical.

At first, all that can be seen is a small children’s bedroom, frames by a vast area of blackness The kids are being settled down for the night when suddenly there is a deafening bomb blast, and the blackness rips open to reveal shattered brickwork and enemy aircraft overhead, silhouetted against a blood-red moon. It is London in the 1940s, and the three children, now orphaned, are soon evacuated by steam train to a cavernous countryside museum to await allocation to a new home.  All this is achieved wordlessly, with the separate components of Jamie Harrison’s cleverly designed set swiftly shifting and turning to represent all the different stages of the children’s journey. It’s a bold and imaginative opening to a show that proves to have those qualities in abundance throughout.

The eldest of the three children is Charlie Rawlins, aged thirteen.  In a touching performance, Conor O’Hara perfectly captures Charlie’s betwixt and betweenness. He’s a newly orphaned child, but he is also now the head of the family, taking on new responsibilities. The tragic nature of the children’s situation is presented very directly, but not dwelt on unduly. There’s a no-nonsense robustness to this show, which is totally lacking in schmaltzy sentimentality.

The children are taken in by the formidable Miss Eglantine Price, who they discover is a trainee witch. Dianne Pilkington portrays the rather posh Miss Price as initially rather cold and stand-offish, and very reluctant to act as mother to three young Cockneys, but she gradually warms to the task, and fabulous adventures follow. There is a very funny episode where Eglantine struggles to fly on a newly purchased broomstick possessed of a mind of its own. Most extraordinary of all, of course, is the flying bed on which they travel to meet the magician Emelius Browne.  That bed really does seem to fly, drawing gasps of astonishment from younger members of the audience, and from some of the older ones, too.

Emelius Browne is supposedly gifted with magical powers, but he is actually a less than competent street magician whose unreliable tricks are all smoke and mirror illusions. Charles Brunton presents him as a brash, fast-talking huckster whose blustering bravado is also illusory; inside, he is sadly lacking in self-belief. As the story progresses, we see Emelius discover his inner hero, and we also see he and Eglantine develop an increasingly tender relationship. Their growing fondness for each other is conveyed with a charming mix of humour and warmth.

Earlier I suggested that this production of Bedknobs And Broomsticks has ‘just about’ all the ingredients of a great musical. Is there a missing ingredient? To some extent there is, for in comparison with other shows featuring music from the extraordinarily talented Sherman Brothers, there’s a lack of truly memorable tunes.  The one number that is most likely to stick in the memory is ‘The Beautiful Briny’ which, ironically, was a cast-off from the original score for Mary Poppins. The songs in Bedknobs And Broomsticks are fine, but there’s nothing that is quite as catchy as the Sherman’s greatest hits, such as ‘A Spoonful Of Sugar’, or ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’. However, their inventiveness with language is very much in evidence, particularly in the songs ‘Negotiality’ and ‘Substitutiary Locomotion’.

In the final moments of Bedknobs And Broomsticks, the children come to realise that their problems will not be solved by magic, for that is the stuff of fantasy, not hard reality. But they now know that even the most challenging of circumstances can be overcome through loyalty, courage and compassion, and surely there’s a kind of magic in that. 

★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 28th January