Dog Man the Musical, based on the graphic novel series about the half-man, half-canine crimefighter created by Captain Underpants author and illustrator Dav Pilkey, lands in London with a whimper rather than a woof.
The bestselling Dog Man book series has sold more than 70m copies worldwide and has been translated into around 50 languages. It has also been a successful movie and a video game.
As a child, Pilkey was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, which he considers to be his superpowers.
With Dog Man the Musical, Pilkey wanted to emphasise using creativity to communicate in other ways besides speech, such as through drawing and dancing. Hence he had one rule for the creative team of the show: “Dog Man should never speak or sing. 80-HD, the robot companion whose name is a play on ADHD, also doesn’t speak.”
Captain Underpants was Pilkey’s first hit with Millennials and Gen Z in 1997, and began as a good but not very bright cop who has a very adroit Golden Retriever dog called Greg. When Greg dies in an explosion his ingenious brain is transplanted to its owner Captain Underpants to create Dog Man.
The creation of Dog Man the Musical is led by George and Harold, two fifth graders who have been creating Dog Man comics for years at school.
For the show, four classic Dog Man stories are rolled up into one big adventure. It’s all about good versus evil, and they bring together familiar characters from the irreverent Dog Man universe such as the dastardly cat Petey, his clone Lil’ Petey, the robot 80-HD and the cyborg fish Flippy and his army of Beasty Buildings.
Like the title of one of the songs from the show, the mix of the hyperkinetic stories should be ‘The Perfect Mashup,’ yet under the blurred direction of Jen Wineman the plotlines proved to be sometimes bewildering. I do accept, however, that this was possibly due to my not having in my favour the ductile brain of a ten-year-old child.
It’s all very silly, quite messy and almost irreverent. It feels slightly like a counterculture for kids, which makes sense because Pilkey as a child admits he struggled to play by the rules at school.
“They’ll turn anything into a musical these days”, exclaim the characters of Dog Man, and given its commercial success this auditory version seemed almost unavoidable.
Written by Kevin Del Aguila and Brad Alexander, Dog Man the Musical first began its journey off-Broadway in 2019. As children’s musicals go, Dog Man the Musical is no Matilda. The songs which are often jolly and bouncy, simply move the plot along and are mostly forgettable. This isn’t helped by the lyrics often being drowned out by much too loud musicians. This felt like an injustice to the high-octane cast, all of whom were stellar and worked superbly together as an ensemble. Such a basic thing as getting the sound mixing right for a musical is unacceptably shoddy for any commercial production. If I were a parent paying for this show this would most certainly give me something to growl about.
For a creation that relies so much on high tech, the special effects in Dog Man the Musical notably lack sophistication. There is a lot of hiding behind sheets to create the transformations, and Dog Man’s metamorphosis simply involves a stick-on nose and floppy ears. It could be argued that this is in line with the cartoony style of the production, but at times it seemed to sum up what seemed overall to be a cheap and creatively lazy effort from the producers of Dog Man the Musical.
However, it seemed to hit the spot with its young target audience who received the production with thundering applawes and doggy howls.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
