To state the obvious: if you’ve no idea who or what Dog Man is, Dog Man the Musical is probably not for you. That’s not a criticism of Dav Pilkey’s wilfully silly graphic novels for primary schoolers and it’s not a criticism of this off-Broadway originating stage adaptation. But this is not a show with a jot of interest in winning over a casual musical theatre crowd. And why would it? Pretty much every child under 12 in the entire country (plus their parents) will know what Dog Man is. That’s plenty of audience.
And indeed, part of the MO of this musical adaptation – by Kevin Del Aguila and Brad Alexander - is how it leans on the fact ticketholders will be familiar with the plot already in order to bypass the obvious budgetary pitfalls associated with staging a story that climaxes with a group of sentient buildings controlled by a psychic fish facing off against a policeman who has had his head replaced by a dog’s.
Instead Jen Wineman’s recast production smartly taps into the meta framing of the stories, which are billed as the creation of George and Harold, the highschooler heroines of Pilkey’s other famous series, Captain Underpants. (Again, if that doesn’t make sense to you, nobody is making you read this).
It’s charming and it’s done with heart
The duo are barely a presence in the actual Dog Man graphic novels, but here they’re practically the leads, with the idea being they’ve decided to stage some of their stories using junk lying around the garage. It’s a sweet framing device – Ricardo Mendes and Peter Lavery are an endearingly wholesome English take on the duo – that cheerily points to the fact that this is a low-budget show that was never going to meaningfully recreate the more out-there bits of the books.
It also takes the pressure off Dog Man himself: the permasmiling Renan Teodoro is a puppyish delight in the role – you practically want to scratch him behind his floppy ears – but his only lines are barks and he functions more as a hype man than a lead, which is fine.
Does any of this make it a great musical? I mean it’s a lot of fun. I’d say its assuredness that it doesn’t need to explain what’s going on to its audience can be a double-edged sword. It sometimes feels garbled: the scene where Dog Man’s diabolical nemesis Petey the Cat (an enjoyable Sam Kipling) escapes from jail on a bunch of helium balloons is breezed through so quickly that I had to think back to the books to work out what the hell was going on. The songs are fine – I enjoyed Flippy the evil fish’s soul number and Petey’s ‘Evil ABCs’ (‘A is for Annihilation’) – but there aren’t that many of them and they’re pleasant rather than spectacular. Part of the issue is that the show has lo-fi origins and consequently feels somewhat exposed on the Queen Elizabeth Hall’s stage, which is almost double the size of anywhere it played in New York. When it’s in a West End-sized theatre you start to want some West End-style bells and whistles – not just because of bang for your buck, but because they offer clarity of action in a larger space.
Still: it’s charming and it’s done with heart. It’s not trying to cynically cash in on a popular IP. The creators clearly love the subject matter, and lil Dog Man fans will feel that – it’s a great summer hols afternoon out.
