The Arts at Marble Arch

Blippi, to the unitiated, is an American educational YouTube character whose U-rated antics have offered a gateway drug to the online world for generations of tots. But you can see him IRL too! Or kind of! The bow-tied spectacle wearer has actually been played by multiple actors on screen and the title Be Like Blippi does raise interesting philosophical questions as to who ‘Blippi’ is precisely. That said, at many of these performances you will get Clayton Grimm, the current ‘real’ Blippi, although he’s taking a lot of time off so check the schedule if you want to see him and not an indistinguishable alternative version playd by another actor. Whoever Blippi is, what you’re pragmatically getting is a gentle curiousity-based adventure from Blippi and his pal Meekah, replete with various beloved songs from the show including ‘The Excavator Song’, ‘Monster Truck’, ‘Dino Dance’ and ‘Curious Like Me’.

This undemanding jukebox musical dramatisation of the real life recording session held between Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis back in December 1956 was a hit on Broadway and the West End when it debuted 15 or so years ago. Now it’s back in a new production from the Barn Theatre in Surrey, directed by Jonathan O’Boyle, which transfers to the Arts at Marble Arch to plug the gap left by the ongoing disaster that is Burlesque. Darren Day stars as Sam Philips, the producer who pioneered the rock’n’ roll sound.

This review is for Burlesque’s 2025 West End run. A reworked version was due to return for a lengther 2026 run at the pop-up The Arts at Marble Arch theatre, but it has been ‘postponed until 2027’.   The omens were not good for this stage musical adaptation of the 2010 Christina Aguilera screen vehicle Burlesque. Foremost among them: it debuted in Manchester and Glasgow last year, but most of its creative team was summarily axed and replaced by one Todrick Hall, an erstwhile American Idol contestant who the bumpf describes as ‘one of the most high-profile and prolific storytellers in the world’. I am slightly exaggerating here. The hugely talented British set designer Soutra Gilmour, for instance, was replaced by Nate Bertone, another American. And Hall was already involved. But he now directs, choreographs and has written most of the songs, plus he stars in not one but two roles. Oh, and while the book is officially written by Steven Antin – who wrote and directed the film – it’s hard not to see the hand of Tod in the larky, metatheatrical script, which is not only very different in tone to the film, but also gives all the larkiest, most metatheatrical lines to Hall’s brace of characters. Anyway, Burlesque isn’t totally inept, but it’s ultimately just bludgeoning, a clangorous three-hour pantomime on steroids that makes the original film look like a model of tastefully plotted restraint. It feels like being trapped in a warzone Jess Folley is Ali, a young lass from...