Regent's Park Open Air Theatre

Adapted direct from Dodie Smith’s 1956 kids’ book – ie, absolute not a Disney production – ‘101 Dalmatians’ is a scrappy affair. It’s the first ever original musical from the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, and it boasts charming puppetry, big-name writers and a scream of a turn from Kate Fleetwood as the evil Cruella de Vil. But by the towering standards of the OAT – known for its revelatory musical revivals – it’s pretty uneven.  If you just view it as a fun kids’ show, you’d be more forgiving. In fact, I was pretty forgiving: I skipped press night and took my children the following afternoon. However, I wouldn’t say it’s really been pushed as a show for youngsters: historically the OAT’s musicals are aimed at an adult audience, the evening finish is certainly too late for my children, and the foregrounding of Fleetwood’s villainous Cruella de Vil in the publicity recalls Disney’s more adult-orientated spin-off film of last year (‘Cruella’). Anyway: my kids had fun at Timothy Sheader’s production. I mean, it starts with a protracted bottom-sniffing scene, for crying out loud, as grown-up dalmatians Pongo (Danny Collins and Ben Thompson) and Perdi (Emma Lucia and Yana Penrose) meet for the first time, give each other a good honk up the backside, fall in love and nudge their bookish, introverted human owners Dominic (Eric Stroud) and Danielle (Karen Fishwick) into starting a relationship. Skip forward a bit and humans and hounds have moved in together, and the latter have pro

For ages now Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre seasons have started with a ‘serious’ play and ended with the big musical. Well, things have been modestly shaken up for the endlessly charming theatre’s ninetieth birthday season, which starts with one big musical (‘Legally Blonde’), continues with another big musical (‘101 Dalmations’) and winds up with poet and playwright Inua Ellams’s new spin on Sophocles’s intense tragedy ‘Antigone’, a pretty heavy note to round things off, that will entirely run in chillier September. His last adaptation, the National Theatre’s ‘Three Sisters’ was pretty high concept, relocating the action to ‘60s Nigeria. Whether he takes similar liberties with Sophocles’s story about a young princess's defiant burial of her brother’s body against city law is to be seen. But it should be a blast however he goes about it.