A reunion show for director Matthew Warchus and composer/lyricist Tim Minchin following the wildly successful "Matilda", "Groundhog Day" has had a slightly rougher time since premiering at London's Old Vic in 2016 - the initial London run was a hit, but the transfer to Broadway fell afoul of being in the same season as juggernauts "Come From Away" and "Dear Evan Hansen", losing all of the 7 Tonys it was nominated for. A recent London revival also sold like gangbusters and finally Michin has had his second musical come home in a grand production, carrying the lead of both London and New York runs, Andy Karl, with it.
There are a few challenges to a musical of a film as beloved as this - is it just revisiting the hit moments from the movie or is it doing something new, and does it translate to song well? For the first ten-fifteen minutes, the musical tends to feel a little by the numbers, with the show very much following the tracks laid down by the original - cynical weather reporter goes to small town, finds himself trapped by bad weather and then by a strange case of living the same day over and over again - but then Michin's songs take flight with a run of songs that take on different angles of the story - a group of medicos and healers looking into Phil's situation in the song "Stuck", deeper analysis of minor characters in "Night will come" and "Playing Nancy", a fun drunken rollick with "Nobody Cares" and a powerful montage of suicide attempts. While Rob Howell's set design has a lot of bells and whistles it holds a simple small-town aesthetic throughout, and Warchus together with choreographer Lizzi Gee gives the show an efortless flow that keeps things moving.
Lead Andy Karl has one of the bigger roles in the music theatre canon - he's rarely offstage and is constantly in motion for most of the run of the show, and he executes it with integrity - from the sarcastic asshole at the beginning of the show, into spiralling depression and an eventual emergence to engage with the world around him. Elise McCann takes the female lead and gives it width and depth as a character who starts out glimpsed and is expanded throughout as she provides a strong positive force within the narrative. The energetic ensemble of sixteen are kept busy bouncing between various roles as they variously antagonise and pal up with Phil along the way, and all do it with relish.
There's one or two moments that land tonally oddly - in particular the power ballad "Hope" which combines the deepest depression with the biggest of power notes, and therefore had members of the audience emitting grand "woos" right when the story is at its darkest - but mostly this is a strong, entertaining show which absoultely deserves to be sween.
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