Bluey’s Big Play
This review is from Christmas 2023. Bluey’s Big Play returns for Christmas 2025.
Where even superior stage adaptations of kids’ cartoons tend not to have much input from the original show creatives, this live adventure for fanatically beloved Australian hound Bluey is as authentic as it comes. ‘Bluey’s Big Play’ is written by the show’s creator Joe Brumm and the voices of its puppets are all-new pre-recordings of the screen cast.
It also feels like the involvement of Brumm has allowed the creative team to do things a little differently - it’s not that Rosemary Myers’s production isn’t crowd-pleasing, it’s just a little less reverential of the source material than these things tend to be.
So you don’t just get a bam-bam-bam compilation of cartoon episodes recreated on stage: there’s a very gentle but nonetheless original plot. It also opens with a couple of cheeky flourishes. The first is the long, wordless intro, in which the puppeteers – the show’s only human performers – ease us in with a segment in which a group of ibises (I believe Bluey and family refer to them as ‘bin chickens’ in the show) wordlessly prance around on Bluey’s street. It’s a pretty, meditative start that chimes with the source show’s weirder moments.
That leads into the arrival of Bluey and the Heeler family, as they decide to have a game of musical statues – amusingly, it’s a sort of origin story for the cartoon’s intro sequence, which takes pleasure in wrong-footing the audience by jumbling up the...