The War of the Worlds, Dominion Theatre, London, review: Bombastic, bloated and accidentally hilarious

There are flame-throwers. There are alien tentacles. There are stage-high, shuffling Martian robots. There’s a 13-piece string section, and oodles of Seventies space-rock. There’s a hologram of Liam Neeson being extremely earnest, a real-life Sugababe (Heidi, the blonde one), and Daniel Bedingfield failing to act at all - but hitting the high notes like a champ.

Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds is a bombastic, bloated, bonkers beast of a show, unwieldy and laden with unhelpful video projections. Despite poor Michael Praed – who plays the journalist who narrates HG Wells’ Victorian sci-fi classic - having more stage presence than anyone else, almost all his lines are given to irritating pre-recorded videos of Neeson, who narrates great chunks of the text at us. The actual actors, meanwhile, under Bob Tomson’s direction are largely left to run hither and thither in front of giant screens playing quite bad CGI videos. Not since the ill-fated Dusty has a musical shown so little faith in its own format.

Still, Wayne’s music – which began life 40 years ago as a prog-rock double-album – is properly exhilarating, performed live onstage under his baton. He’s assembled a band with some seriously tight and tasty guitar skills (and plenty of Martian wee-oos on the synths, of course). Add the sort of full-beam blinding lights and pyrotechnics you more readily associate with a rock concert (and the show has been on an epic arena tour already), and there’s plenty of enjoyable spectacle here.

On a dramatic level, however, it’s frequently accidentally hilarious. There’s potential for it to become a kitsch cult classic, B-movie so-bad-it’s-delicious style. But there’s still a lot that’s just bad-bad, from lame attempts at physical theatre to maddening screens constantly flying in and out. Considering the flash and cash lavished on the production, there’s also a sense of wasted opportunity; you wonder what they might have been able to dream up if they had anyone with a vaguely theatrical imagination in charge. Or if it had been allowed to mischievously embrace the sci-fi silliness and go all out as a retro schlock-horror comedy.

The human-scale performances are really not the point, but for what it’s worth, Bedingfield is shouty and brash as a survivalist artilleryman, but barnstorms through his big number, while Madalena Alberto and former pop-star Heidi Range as the love interests are both fine within that narrow, ahem, range. David Essex as ‘The Voice of Humanity’ is given a grand title and rubbish part, woefully underused; Jimmy Nail as a Parson experiencing a rather extreme crisis of faith prompts chortles at his swivel-eyed over-acting – surely an intentional sending up the role? As for the virtual Liam Neeson’s stupid videos and holograms? Well, those flames got dangerously close to the screens at one point. Let us pray for future audiences it catches.

If you love the album, and treat this like a pimped-out arena concert, it’s all good fun – and really, it’s best to surrender to the silliness. But if you’re expecting a fully-realised piece of musical theatre, you might find yourself wishing for a Martian Heat-Ray of your own with which to raze the production.