Harvey & Javine in Daddy Cool

Mark Shenton in his Theatre.com Review: “The autumn onslaught of big musicals in the West End has begun with Daddy Cool, the sole indigenously created and located new show in a sea of Broadway imports and revivals. Though there is definitely room for a musical that represents the multi-cultural melting pot of our great city, and I wanted to admire the sheer demented lunacy of its wilder excesses, a sense of numbed stupefaction settled in. It was Noel Coward who once famously observed the potency of cheap music; but he wasn’t factoring in just how expensively some cheap music can be inflated and dressed in loud musical arrangements and even louder production values. As given a terrifyingly tacky big budget treatment here, the back catalogue of German musical Svengali, Frank Farian, is given a contemporary makeover that is sometimes unavoidably infectious but even more frequently enervating... As a giant parrot, ominously perched in the theatre’s roof throughout the show, nonsensically descends and hovers over the front stalls for a carnival finale that invades the audience for the inevitable megamix, the seal is put on an evening of mess and excess.”

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: “If I thought anything was certain, it was that I could never enjoy anything in a theatre that had first forced me to walk along a red carpet and through a load of performers dressed as birds, mainly chickens, before entering the auditorium. That I found yet another fowl, perhaps an overgrown parrot, dangling high above my head as I sat down only confirmed my resistance. Well, maybe I'm being a bit chicken myself, but last night I didn't feel like giving Daddy Cool the bird. True, the show is packed with young men strutting around like roosters while delivering testosterone-packed chords to their human hens. And, true, the story is pretty silly, an Anglo-Caribbean love-story vestigially indebted to Romeo and Juliet or, given the unstoppable music, West Side Story. Yet the casts' energy is as impressive as its choreographic discipline.”

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “When first received the press release announcing that there was to be a new West End musical based on the hits of Boney M, my first reaction was that I must be on the receiving end of an elaborate practical joke. I mean Boney M, for heaven's sake. Has there ever been a naffer band than this pop-disco outfit of the 1970s manufactured by a mysterious German producer called Frank Farian? Well I suppose there have been Freddie and the Dreamers and the Bay City Rollers but offhand I can't think of many others with quite the squirm factor of Boney M. This was the pop group to which your drunken uncle disgraced himself with the chief bridesmaid at the wedding reception disco, the band to which I fell into the Thames during a drunken NUJ press trip in my salad days as a cub reporter… So I arrived at the Shaftesbury Theatre prepared to sneer, only to find that I'd stayed to cheer. Not three cheers certainly, indeed not quite two, but at least one and three-quarters—which is a pretty good strike rate for a new British musical. Say what you like about Boney M, no one can deny that their tunes are as adhesive as a lump of chewing gum on the sole of your shoe. Once heard, their biggest hits are never forgotten, however strenuously you wish you could get the things out of your head. So the sing-along factor is guaranteed. The show, with a book by Stephen Plaice and Amani Naphtali and given a raw, energetic production by Andy Goldberg, also boasts a soupcon of wit, a hint of a heart and lashings of energy… The Shaftesbury, for so long a graveyard of dreadful musicals, might just have a hit on its hands for once.”

Javine in Daddy Cool

Rhoda Koenig of The Independent: Mamma mia, whatever possessed the producers of Dad