The idea of a musical version of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief – the first of Rick Riordan’s Greek-gods-in-contemporary-New York series of YA novels – is on the face of it an eye-wateringly ambitious one. There has already been an expensive film and an even more expensive TV series following the supernatural adventures of Jackson, the gawky demigod son of Poseidon. You might therefore think a musical would need to have a fair amount of wodge behind it – much more than the modest means of this off-Broadway hit now staged anew at The Other Palace would suggest.
In fact it’s clear early on that a low-ish budget counts in the favour of Joe Tracz and Rob Rokicki’s adaptation. The extreme goofiness of Riordan’s books has never really made it to the screen, but writer Tracz and musician and lyricist Rokicki play it up a treat, with witty punk pop songs and a loose, freewheeling tone and DIY aesthetic that’s closer to a cabaret show than a meticulously sculptured Broadway opus. Indeed, the fact that Riordan’s novels are as much a sardonic homage to New York as they are to Ancient Greece certainly helps considerably in this respect – it feels very NYC,
Max Harwood is fun as hapless, nasal-voiced schoolboy Percy, who has no idea that he’s in any way unusual until he gets attacked by a Fury while on a class trip to MoMA. His mum reveals his deadbeat dad was actually a Greek god – and is then killed by a minotaur as she takes him to the safety of Camp Half-Blood, a demigod summer camp run by Joe Allen’s zero-fucks-to-give Mr D, aka Dionysus. This, I would say, probably all happens in the first 20 minutes.
It’s at Camp Half-Blood that Percy meets his new BFFs: Anabeth (Jessica Lee) a shitkicking daughter of Athena, and Grover (Scott Folan) a nervy satyr. It’s also here that we meet the budget constraints of Lizzi Gee’s production - both Grover and the camp’s activities director Chiron (a centaur) are half beast and the actors wear kind of… special trousers that kind of look like the thing they’re supposed to be (Chiron only actually has two horse legs). But I think it’s fine! The whole thing is intended as a laugh to a large extent, and the budget limit is part of that.
There is also something very pleasing about the extreme briskness of it all. In the second half the trio set out on a quest from New York to LA to enter the Underworld and retrieve Zeus’s mislaid thunderbolt, encountering copious monsters plus a squirrel on the way. This whole massive sequence of events cheerily zips by in about 45 all-killer-no-filler minutes, an awesome feat of compression.
That said, The Lightning Thief fizzles out in its very final furlong, when a more traditional epic finale is called for. It’s not so much budgetary constraints as time ones – the climax sees the trio face off against a Big Bad who is only fleetingly explained and then rapidly dealt with. The reveal of a secondary villain is a bit more satisfying, but those unfamiliar with the story may be bemused by the fact it ends on an abrupt cliffhanger.
The key thing about this musical – and certainly a factor that was missing from the films – is just how much love there is for the source material. Zeus knows what anyone unfamiliar with the books is liable to make of it all, and its cockatrices do come home to roost with that garbled ending. But Riordan lovers won’t regret the trip to this giddy celebration of his books’ dafter side.
