There is always a certain power in a story that proves itself capable of becoming a generational landmark, and one quick look at the audience gathering at the WMC for the first Cardiff performance of The Lightning Thief proved that the one first woven in the Percy Jackson novels is such a story.
The books themselves are now exactly twenty years old, the eponymous Lighting Thief having been published in 2005, and the (originally off-Broadway) musical, which premiered in 2014, is comfortably pushing twelve, but both the appeal and the excitement have clearly not died down. Between teenagers wearing Percy Jackson merch and young adults seeking a nostalgia kick, the atmosphere was buzzing even before the curtain went up, a testament to the genuine love of the audience for this story and those characters. That, in itself, is almost a guarantee of success for a production which is otherwise confronted with a fairly daunting task: this, with its abundant share of mythological monsters, combat scenes, and long-distance travel (including at one point into the Underworld) is not the kind of story that easily lends itself to adaptation for the stage.
Precisely because so many elements of the original material are very hard to render in a live theatre performance, the musical has to cut some corners and make some concessions, and some parts of it are, in terms of both staging and pace, admittedly clunky. This is especially true for the first half, which has to introduce a portentous amount of information over a very short period of time, and moves as a result at breakneck speed, with little or no time to pause and reflect on what is actually happening. Moments that should be poignant and even tragic feel lessened as a result: the protagonist suffers the brutal loss of his mother and the collapse of the life he’s known thus far, but he barely has time to process his grief because we are immediately launching into a comedy number.
The problem resolves itself, once all the exposition is out of the way, in the second half of the musical, which slows down into a more even pace and has some genuinely touching moments of introspection, the most outstanding courtesy of Kayna Montecillo’s Annabeth, who also delivered one of the better performances of the night. The somewhat dry humour of the production also shines through best in this second half, and several moments are genuinely laugh-worthy (Cahir O’Neill as Grover and Abe Armitage in the lead role are equally to praise for this, with Armitage’s performance having the added merit of making a very non-standard hero still feel relatable).
The ensemble carries a lot of the responsibility for a successful delivery, as is often the case with musicals, and embarked on the task with what came across as genuine enthusiasm, which certainly helped in maintaining the right tone throughout. The staging was technically proficient, if not for a small but recurring issue with musicals at the WMC – the volume felt a little too loud, and this was jarring in places, especially with those performers who were singing on the higher registers. All in all, however, the main impression was the whole cast was having fun performing, and the audience was having fun with them.
Fun is probably the key concept to understand this musical; much as this is, ultimately, a story about found family, valuing what you love, and finding the courage of being yourself out there in the real world – all very relevant concepts even twenty years after the book’s release – none of these themes are explored at particularly great depth, as is probably both wise and correct for this type of production.
Ultimately this should be enjoyable and a bit bombastic, and that it certainly manages to be; some of the tunes have genuine earworm potential, some of the jokes deliberately sit between a groan and a laugh, and the whole has just enough adrenaline and just enough heart to make for a fun night for the whole family – even teenage-escorting parents who have never picked up one of the books will find something to appreciate in it. There’s also some added value for the Greek mythology buffs: transposed as they are into a modern American setting, all of the nods and references to Greek myth are actually remarkably accurate. To be both fun and clever is, in this day and age, no small feat for a pop culture product.
Wales Millennium Centre until January 24
