Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs You’ve got to feel for Sir Elton John. He’s had a wretched couple of weeks. On Sunday, he shocked fans at the gala night for The Devil Wears Prada musical with news that he had lost his eyesight.And this, after it was announced last month that another of his musicals, Tammy Faye, was closing on Broadway thanks to poor ticket sales.I don’t like to kick a man when he’s down. However, after seeing this soulless musical version of the Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway film, for which Elton wrote the score, I can offer scant consolation.Where the movie had style and swagger, this production by veteran Broadway director Jerry Mitchell – supposedly re-worked since it first tried out in Chicago in 2022 and was dubbed a ‘haute mess’ by the New York Post – still looks like a cheap knock-off.Transposing a snappy film with glamorous locations and Hollywood A-listers to the stage was never going to be easy. Even so, Kate Wetherhead’s book plods through the story of bright young fashion by-pass Andy, who wins a job at New York’s fictional fashion rag Runway magazine despite her cable knit tights.Here she meets notorious editor Miranda Priestly, a gorgon-eyed fashion Nazi who goes through PAs like facial wipes.But it’s also true that Sir Elton’s score, together with Shaina Taub and Mark Sonnenblick’s lyrics, fails to amplify the story.It lacks wit, warmth or joie de vivre. And this from a composer whose greatest songs have been about young people like Andy struggling to find their way in a hostile world – think of Elton’s songs in Billy Elliot and The Lion King, not to mention albums like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. (L to R) Shaina Taub, Sir Elton John and David Furnish speak on stage at ‘The Devil Wears Prada Musical’ charity gala night in support of the Elton John Aids Foundation at The Dominion Theatre on December 1, 2024 in London, England (L to R) Rhys Whitfield, Matt Henry, Vanessa Williams, Georgie Buckland and Amy Di Bartolomeo bow at the curtain call during ‘The Devil Wears Prada Musical’ charity gala night Rehearsal for The Devil Wears Prada: A New Musical in this undated handout image in London, BritainBut Prada could have been composed by AI. Along with metronomic dance anthems, it includes a toe-curling duet – I Only Love You For Your Body – between Andy (Georgie Buckland) and her sappy chef boyfriend Nate (Rhys Whitfield) after he’s cooked her braised beef cheeks for dinner.And Vanessa Williams as the office despot Miranda is as inscrutable as Melania Trump. She may be wholly resistant to emotional articulation – even by Sir Elton. At least her lines come with a thick layer of frost, and she serves well as a high-status vehicle for the Gucci sunglasses that win her a roar of approval from the audience when she rises through the floor in emulation of real-life Vogue super-editor Anna Wintour.Buckland, however, struggles to breathe life into her role as Andy, which has a near-total personalitydeficit. Her big moment in the film – slinging her phone into the Fontaine de la Concorde in Paris – is replaced by one where she simply drops it into a vase. Even her climactic outfit is… beige.Yes she can hold a note (and shake a leg) in tunes including her hollow hymn of self-affirmation What’s Right For Me? But it’s not enough. Like Emily Blunt in the film, Amy Di Bartolomeo is a running joke as catty fashion desperado Emily, and she almost amuses with her sarcastic farewell Bon Voyage, when Andy gets to go to Paris instead of her.Matt Henry offers a glimmer of warmth as Nigel, Andy’s confidant. Yet he also has the show’s most risible lyric in a supposedly soul-searching ballad, as he recalls his elite life in fashion fitting him ‘like a Lagerfeld glove’.Tim Hatley’s set design has all the appeal of an airport departure lounge, despite panoramic projections of Manhattan Island and central Paris. Its finest moment is a cumbersome black staircase in an infernal, Alexander McQueen-style costume parade at a fateful charity ball.And Mitchell’s choreography? Well, it’s little more than synchronised pole-dancing and cheerleading in haute couture.While it is true that the ticket prices (which range from about £50 to £250) are much cheaper than almost anything you can buy from Prada, it is not unreasonable for us to have hoped for something more sensational.
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