The Other Palace

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...

Where family pantos tend to play it safe with variants on just a handful of fairy stories, the London adult pantomime scene is a lot more liberated: Jodie Prenger and Bobby Delaney’s Homo Alone is a queer adult spin on timeless kids’ Christmas movie Home Alone. The plot sounds identical: initially delighted to have the house to himself, Kevin starts to regret that his large family accidentally forgot about him, espeically when two burglars try and break in. Presumably it’ll all end up playing out rather differently.