Well it's here now, with Disney trumpeting loudly that they have had no influence over director John Tiffany's vision for the work - has it proved the doubters wrong? Well...
So we all know the plot: toymaker Gepetto carves a boy puppet and makes a wish that he could be real; the Blue Fairy gives the puppet life and promises to make him into a real boy if he proves he can be good, allocating him a knowledgeable cricket as his exterior conscience. Pinocchio however cannot help falling in with bad company and suffers many setbacks before achieving his goal.
Dennis Kelly - the bookwriter for MATILDA - has tweaked the plot to reflect the darker 1883 original by Carlo Collodi but if anything it felt like he had simply fitted PINOCCHIO into the MATILDA template - it has the same moralistic tone behind the cod-psychobabble of "finding yourself" and how pain reveals you are human etc. Rather than being enlightening it's just a buzzkill.
It's as if Tiffany and Kelly decided that to have too much levity, too much pure fun for fun's sake, in the show would open it up to accusations of being frivolous - this PINOCCHIO has to be about something more profound - but what is wrong with fun for fun's sake? They certainly don't mind piling on the sentiment especially at the end - but it appears that this is allowed as you have to have the tearjerker ending; and actually the ending works better than most of the rest.
The sentiment is set up early by having the Blue Fairy slowly revealed to be the spirit of Gepetto's dead wife which helps the sentimental pay-off at the end but again it's as if a deliberate thought was "make it integrated, she can't JUST be a fairy". The thinking constantly leads to an odd struggle within the show, knowing they have to do the big numbers like I HAVE NO STRINGS or HI-DIDDLE-DEE-DEE while trying to keep the story and characters meaningful. You can't have it both ways.
In fact for large stretches of the show I found it to be an oddly charmless production, deliberately ugly and exaggeratedly so. The use of oversized puppets for the humans that Pinocchio meets - while admittedly clever in keeping human-sized actor Joe Idris-Roberts seemingly puppet-sized - seemed to work only intermittently; I think that the success of the large-headed puppets oddly relied on the human element so while Mark Hadfield managed to make Gepetto a really rounded character, the performances of Gershwyn Eustache Jr as Stromboli and David Kirkbride as the Coachman outstayed their welcome very quickly.
There didn't seem to be any particular inner-engine in the show either: the two Pinocchio-in-peril scenes - trapped in Stomboli's marionette theatre and on the frightening Pleasure Island - seemed to go on and on and on. The last scene was made more interminable by a grating performance by Dawn Sievewright as Pinocchio's yob mate Lampy, played here as an obnoxious Glaswegian yoof. She couldn't turn into a donkey quick enough. David Langham played the louche Fox who is intent on stopping Pinocchio becoming a real boy - for a reason that was garbled to say the least - but I found him fairly blah, when you are playing a dandy fox there is really no need to play the subtext.
There is also another show-stalling performance from Audrey Brisson as Jiminy Cricket; the odd thing here is that despite the technical expertise in creating the puppets, the Cricket one seems fairly static so is literally bounced around the stage by Brisson and the allocated puppeteer so it looks a bit amateur. I suppose it's alright that Jiminy has had a sex change but, dear God, why saddle the character with a bizarre screechy voice which kills any laugh lines stone dead? The name rang a bell with me and sure enough I had seen Brisson playing Bella Chagall in THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK so Jiminy was given the Emma Rice treatment - do it in a childish screechy voice and play it like Theatre In Education in a remedial school. The puppet had nice glittery red eyes though.
To be honest I am kinda over the whole puppet thing now... there is only so often you can suspend your disbelief as the stage overflows with puppeteers manipulating a tiny object. Yes WAR HORSE was magnificent but it is fast becoming tedious. But apart from that Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the show?
I liked Joe Idris-Roberts as Pinocchio very much - with all the bizarreness going on around him he managed to deliver a winning performance which kept him sympathetic while all else was drab and, as I said, Mark Hadfield using just his voice managed to convey the sadness behind the kindly toymaker. I also liked Annette McLaughlin who brought emotional ballast to the show as the Blue Fairy although she seemed to do a lot of going off and coming on, they could have used more imaginative ways for her to appear - especially as the electric blue floating flame that presaged her appearance was a constant wonder as it floated above the stage and around the set.
Bob Crowley's set was suitably lavish and spectacular when called for - I also really liked the looming presence of the ominous Whale, seemingly appearing from nowhere out of a gloomy darkness - but there was no single image that sealed the show in one's imagination. The lighting by the ever-busy Paule Constable was one of the show's successes as was the choreography by Steven Hoggett - though I am still stumped as to why GIVE A LITTLE WHISTLE as choreographed for several ladders on coasters; it was a directorial choice too far and merely drew attention to itself.
Martin Lowe has adapted the film score cleverly - the Disney film only features five songs - but here they have been padded out and added to with music not used in the film. However these classic songs show up in their entirety about as often as country buses - but let us not forget that the cartoon only lasts 88 minutes, the play lasts 145 minutes. As I said, the headlong dive into sentiment at the end felt almost like a relief after all the production's over-thinking, and this was in part thanks to a stirring choral version of WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR.
I wish I had liked it more... but then again, I wish they had made it more likeable.
