You’re better off with Master Chef: PATRICK MARMION reviews The Great British Bake Off Musical
The Great British Bake Off Musical (Noel Coward Theatre, London)
Rating: 
Verdict: Half-baked sugar rush
Bake Off or Master Chef? Sweet or savoury? In my household we’re definitely Master Chef. Not because we’re such great cooks, but because we like to see our contestants really suffer. Bake Off is a sugar-based feelgood confection by comparison and this half-baked theatrical spin off proves lethally saccharine and culpably inane.
Despite eight sappy contestants including a Syrian refugee, a carer from Blackpool who’s just lost her mum, and a recently widowed policeman from Bristol, we’re really here to see Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood — who have been renamed Pam and Phil, perhaps to offset legal action. Yet they have nothing to fear from their obsequious portrayal.
Haydn Gwynne’s Pam is like a painted Maypole topped with coloured glasses and tinted wig. Her big moment is pulling a cart wheel in a Busby-girl routine. And although she’s presented as a bit of a lush, no one really believes it.
John Owen-Jones’s Phil, meanwhile, is a ringer for Hollywood — but his George Galloway twinkle is an arguable upgrade. His shtick is shifting about as if furtively queueing for a loo, eyebrow cocked à la Roger Moore, hands slid halfway into jeans pockets. The famously rare handshake of culinary approval is delivered like the icy clasp of Death.
Despite eight sappy contestants including a Syrian refugee and a carer from Blackpool who’s just lost her mum, we’re really here to see Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood
Haydn Gwynne’s Pam (right) is like a painted Maypole topped with coloured glasses and tinted wig
The story’s wittering comperes (Zoe Birkett and Scott Paige — a long way from Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding) condense an entire series into two and a half hours, after which we are even (spoiler alert) swindled of a winner.
Naff jokes come as standard — ‘Cake Middleton’, for heaven’s sake! — but the real problem is that without a credible knock-out contest to drive the action, there’s little or no drama to Rachel Kavanaugh’s omni-jolly production, which is ploddingly formulaic.
Pippa Cleary’s music for the most part has the sophistication of pre-school television. Only one number stands out — Pam and Phil’s duet I’d Never Be Me Without You — ‘You’re the wax in my ear, the pain in my rear’.
Otherwise Cleary and Jake Brunger’s lyrics include the gratuitously execrable ‘It’s not about baking, it’s about the choices you’re making’.
If you ask me, you’re better off with Master Chef. That could make a deliciously cruel opera. You heard it here first.
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