Elf The Musical review: Pure feel-good joy with just enough Christmas schmaltz-John Nathan-Entertainment – Metro

The cast of Elf The Musical (Picture: Mark Senior)

As with A Christmas Carol, it is the cynicism, not the Christmas spirit, that makes Elf so watchable.

True, this musical version of Will Ferrell’s 2003 movie is like a cheap bauble compared to Dickens’s eternal, classy classic. But aren’t many seasonal shows?

The back story sees Santa find a stowaway in his sack, who is then raised by elves at the North Pole. We join the ridiculous life journey of Simon Lipkin’s Buddy when he is a big-boned six-foot something travelling by mini iceberg in search of his biological father in New York.

Balancing the schmaltz is the city’s disdain for all things Christmassy, which gives audiences at least something credible to latch on to.

‘Even little children think that Santa’s overrated, I kinda get the feeling that New York is jaded,’ cries Buddy in a second-act big number with a chorus line of disillusioned fake Santas, the big elf’s naïveté now all but melted.

And if Buddy’s publisher father Walter (Tom Chambers) turns out to be a Scrooge-like workaholic, his boss is even, well, scroogier.

There is yet more antidote to fatal sentimentality thanks to the knowing score by Matthew Sklar (music) and Chad Beguelin (lyrics), while the feel-good subplot about whether or not Santa actually exists is tackled head-on for doubting children.

Simon Lipkin as Buddy and Georgina Castle as Jovie (Picture: Mark Senior)

Yet more than all this, what keeps Philip McKinley’s New York production – which first arrived on this very stage in 2015 as fresh as newly fallen snow – is British star Lipkin.

This well-known yet underrated musical theatre regular (also the star of the most recent Nativity movie) is just terrific in the decidedly un-elfin title role. Well supported by Georgina Castle’s New York ice queen Jovie, who somewhat inexplicably falls for this lummox’s guileless charm, the immensely likeable Lipkin moves with a grace and agility that belies his size.

He is so good in fact, you don’t miss Ferrell at all.

Elf The Musical is playing at the Dominion Theatre, London

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