Like everybody else, I was surprised when I heard that The Great British Bake Off was going to be made into a musical. I could imagine it on stage in a send-up sketch in an old-fashioned revue. I could imagine it as a film in the old Ealing Comedy manner. But as to a musical, not really.
But here it is: a wholesome, funny and serious, sweet and sugary ensemble piece. The script is loaded with innuendo (some very crude) and baking puns galore. The book and lyrics are by Jake Brunger. The music and lyrics are by Pippa Cleary. Rachel Kavanaugh directs a very efficient 2 hour 30 minute production with interval.
The television series, which began in 2010 on BBC and later transferred to Channel 4, has a very loyal public base and the fans, at which quite rightly this musical is deliberately aimed, were out in force at the Noël Coward Theatre and absolutely loving it, oohing and aahing very loudly.
The intentionally excruciating awful opening number, describing the birth of flour and sugar, a childishly silly biblical pastiche, suggests, quite wrongly, we are in for a farcical parody of the series.
Haydn Gwynne and John Owen-Jones look amazingly like the judges, Pam Lee and Phil Hollinghurst, they so affectionately caricature. They have one of the best songs, I’d Never Be Me Without You. The lyrics are in the witty Cole Porter manner.
Gwynne also has a mini-Broadway number, sequins and all, to open the second half which she does with tongue in cheek (and a cartwheel!) but it’s incongruous and it feels it really shouldn’t be there.
The presenters are played by Scott Paige and Zoe Birkett. Paige leads the company in a comic strudel number, Slap It Like That.
The competing bakers include a bereaved, lonely carer, an elderly gay, a vegan hipster, a privileged graduate, a widower, an Italian cook and a youthful Syrian immigrant.
The carer (Charlotte Wakefield), full off self-doubt, has the whole theatre rooting for her and wanting her romance with the widower (Adrian Humbley) to work.
Claire Moore as brash Babs has a big lament which she belts out in the Ethel Merman Gypsy manner. Aharon Rayner is an engaging immigrant and he has a short scene which builds to a song which oddly never materialises.
The unpleasant graduate (Grace Mouat), who wants to win at all costs, behaves as if she is a pantomime villain in a totally different adaptation, in which the reality show has been turned into a murder mystery, along the lines of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, killing off the bakers one by one.
The Great British Bake Off Musical is strictly for GBBO fans and there were 5.2 million of them at the last count.
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