The Devil Wears Prada musical review: Meryl Streep is missing

The Devil Wears Prada musical review and star rating: ★★★☆☆

Despite her many more serious, grown up roles, Meryl Streep has become defined by The Devil Wears Prada. Such is the fascination with enigmatic Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who Streep plays a fictionalised version of in the film. Both Wintour and the character Miranda Priestly are fierce and formidable; their language sharp and uncompromising. That’s what makes her so much fun: like the best panto villains, she’s horrifyingly real: we’ve all had bosses with shades of Priestly and Streep’s Oscar-winning performance is an exquisite joy. 

The trouble with this musical is that Vanessa Williams is miscast as the magazine editor; her soft-around-the-edges performance lacking the fear factor and her delivery missing the comedy beats of lines. She is about as formidable as a pair of Primark pyjamas.

It’s puzzling: Williams is a West End and Broadway legend and knows perfectly well how to sculpt a role. I assume she wanted to find a fresh way into the character first introduced in Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel following a young woman called Andy who interns at Priestly’s magazine. That’s fair enough, but this shoulders-down Priestly can’t command the stage or our attention: on occasions I found myself tuning out. Priestly in the film – and Wintour for that matter – are so commanding you should hang not just on their every word, but their every syllable. 

It’s a terrible shame, because the rest of the cast of this musical – with a catchy original score by Elton John and direction and choreography by Tony Award winner Jerry Mitchell – deliver. Georgie Buckland and Ami di Bartolomeo raise the roof, Buckland bringing an endearing, exaggerated nerdiness as Priestly’s assistant Andy, moving the role beyond associations with Anne Hathaway’s interpretation to find something fresh. Di Bartolomeo is astounding as the exasperated Emily, Priestly’s long-suffering and insecure assistant. You feel her channelling Emily’s frustration when she belts a couple of tremendous showstoppers, especially Bon Voyage, where a team of camp nurses help her recover after an accident.

It’s one of not nearly enough deftly creative moments in this musical that can often look and feel dated: when the nurses break the fourth wall and start dancing in sync the audience adores the change of pace, clearly craving more of this offbeat stuff.

Tim Hatley’s sets go from underwhelming kitchenettes and office desks against seas of beige to something more interesting when the pace tightens in the second act. The magazine’s annual ball looks resplendent, and the ensemble numbers pick up, but the trouble is when you’re competing with the inventive staging of Why Am I So Single?, the spectacular new show from the creators of six, and the technological masterstrokes of Mean Girls the Musical, it’s hard to justify the bland design that pervades too much of this show.

In terms of the story, Kate Wetherhead’s book adds a pointless new corporate overlord who doesn’t add any jeopardy, otherwise the script remains largely the same, with all the killer lines in tact, like “gird your loins” which has the huns raising their prosecco flutes aloft, whooping and cheering. Oh, and the cryingly dull romance subplot is even more boring on stage.

This really should be prettier, tighter and funnier. Perhaps ultimately the show reveals how, for the want of a better way of putting it, not much goes on in The Devil Wears Prada. But all the same, Priestly is a rich and complex character with much to say about the role of powerful women in society beyond the seemingly superficial clutches of the fashion industry plot.

Wintour herself has typically kept shtum about the film, once saying she “wasn’t bothered by it at all.” She was at the gala night of this musical but we’ll possibly never know what she really thinks. My instinct is that Priestly wouldn’t have made it past the interval.

The Devil Wears Prada musical plays at the Dominion Theatre

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