The Other Palace

The idea of a musical version of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief – the first of Rick Riordan’s Greek-gods-in-contemporary-New York series of YA novels – is on the face of it an eye-wateringly ambitious one. There has already been an expensive film and an even more expensive TV series following the supernatural adventures of Jackson, the gawky demigod son of Poseidon. You might therefore think a musical would need to have a fair amount of wodge behind it – much more than the modest means of this off-Broadway hit now staged anew at The Other Palace would suggest.  In fact it’s clear early on that a low-ish budget counts in the favour of Joe Tracz and Rob Rokicki’s adaptation. The extreme goofiness of Riordan’s books has never really made it to the screen, but writer Tracz and musician and lyricist Rokicki play it up a treat, with witty punk pop songs and a loose, freewheeling tone and DIY aesthetic that’s closer to a cabaret show than a meticulously sculptured Broadway opus. Indeed, the fact that Riordan’s novels are as much a sardonic homage to New York as they are to Ancient Greece certainly helps considerably in this respect – it feels very NYC, Max Harwood is fun as hapless, nasal-voiced schoolboy Percy, who has no idea that he’s in any way unusual until he gets attacked by a Fury while on a class trip to MoMA. His mum reveals his deadbeat dad was actually a Greek god – and is then killed by a minotaur as she takes him to the safety of Camp Half-Blood, a demigod...

Yes, it’s a musical adaptation of the 2004 Adam Sandler/Drew romcom, which was a massive hit at the height of Sandlermania, and remains at least fairly well remembered. Its aggressively goofy plot about a louche marine biologist – with a posse of eccentric humans and animals – who falls for a woman who can’t remember the events of the previous day would seem to lend itself to the intrinsic silliness of the genre. Whatever the case, this world premiere run for 50 First Dates at the mid-size The Other Palace looks like it has the potential to be a big deal: American humourists David Rossmer and Steve Rosen have written the songs and script, while the big deal is director Casey Nicholaw, best known for The Book of Mormon, and suggesting this run is a tryout for Broadway.