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80 Days the Musical, Arena Theatre, Regent Centre, Christchurch

RELUCTANT world traveller Phileas Fogg is obsessed with checking the time on his pocket watch, and during this production I found myself sharing the same obsession.
For a musical to work it needs, first and foremost, a good book and catchy tunes. But it also needs that certain indefinable something – and that, sadly, is what this show simply does not have, so despite the huge efforts of a cast who really did work their socks off, it was at best disappointing and at worst rather tedious.

Where I think the cast might have improved things a little was in making sure they could actually be heard clearly, but a range of pseudo-foreign accents plus the unfamiliarity of the words made clarity difficult - a pity, because when one did catch some of those very funny one-liners it was clear from the general lack of laughter that they had gone mostly un-noticed.

But thankfully Jules Verne’s book is known to most of us, and with Tim Wallace-Abbot and Adam Donoghue turning in a couple of smashing performances as Phileas Fogg and his manservant Passepartout, plus excellent support and some exceedingly good and highly amusing scenes along the way, all was not lost.

Linda Kirkman

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