My Neighbour Totoro - Barbican / Coliseum / Gillian Lynne

Was really looking forward to this - the reviews swayed me to buy 3 tickets at £90 each. The lesson here is , I guess, not to trust the reviews...

Over-long, over-blown and under-acted.

I must confess I didn't know the source material beforehand, but that shouldn't have been an issue. What was an issue, was the deathly pace throughout - sections where characters moved s l o w l y ( yes, I know Japanese Kabuki influence...) but this lead to the first half running at 1hr 20 mins. 15 minutes could easily have been cut by pace issues. The result was that it felt indulgent. Don't know how anyone under the age of 12 could stick such a funereal staging. Lots of very underwhelmed looking kids at the interval..

The acting, Im afraid was generally very poor. There were plenty of scenes that didn't involve puppets or music, but did involve over-projected pantomime delivery . There were two notable exceptions to this: the two main sisters were winning and engaging for the most part.
Some performances were just embarrassing . The night I saw the show, we had the understudy singer on, who couldn't really ...well..sing. Most of the high notes eluded her.

What I did like was seeing an all-Asian cast, the first scene with the huge Totoro puppet and the chorus of spirits/observers, and the chickens. The chickens were great!

The ending was very abrupt and had the most bizarre, extended curtain-call where the whole story of the show was re-enacted. This meant that the applause had to carry on for a good 10 minutes and those brave souls who gave a standing-ovation ( about 30 in a full house) had to stay on their feet.

I write this more in sadness than anything else. I was wanting a magical evening of high theatricality but what I got was a rep-standard panto with a huge budget. Save your pennies: go and see you local panto instead.

I've seen this twice from the front row now - thanks to those amazing £25 day seats - and am itching to go back again! For me this is a five-star show that people will be talking about for a long time.

In terms of getting day seats, I did exactly as outlined by jamb0r and others earlier. I checked regularly a few days in advance for the date I was after, and when the seating plan for that date could be seen (because of returned seats being put back on sale, I guess), I emailed the URL/address of that page to myself. Then on the morning, from about 9.55am onwards, I kept clicking on that to refresh it, and then on both occasions, at about 9.58am (not 10am), the whole front row miraculously appeared, and I had my pick of the seats. It's got to be one of the best bargains around at the moment!

Fair enough - my expectation was for something close to perfection, synonymous with Japanese attention to detail and high production values. This fell short for me.

I said earlier in the thread I’m always a little mystified at how popular Totoro is. I haven’t seen the stage show, still hope to, but I did wonder about how slight the story is for a two act night at the theatre. The film is 86 minutes, and if you don’t count the opening and closing credits sequences it’s probably barely 80. Plus a big element in the film is Hayao Miyazaki’s love of nature, which I’d imagine is really hard to get across on a stage.

In terms of dichotomies, I wonder what people would have made of it if act two was Grave of the Fireflies like the original Japanese double-bill movie release?

I don't think I'd be able to handle Grave of the Fireflies on stage either and wonder how they'd cast Setsuko.

any chance of this having a further life given its whopping huge scale?

Totoro bored me. One of my pet hates is adults pretending to be young kids add in long sections of very little happening, along with people saying Act 2 was slower and I cut my losses at the interval. It also didn't help that i really don't like small things like ants, swarming around in huge numbers, so even the house dust thuings made me look the other way lol

I liked the way they did Totoro, the sheer size of the inflatable was impressive, as was the way he just appeared out of the darkness. Great set that used every inch of that huge stage, but meh. Not for me.

As someone who’s part-Japanese and with this film being a v cherished part of my childhood (and now my child’s as well), I was pretty nervous about seeing this.

However, I neednt have worried. Following some comments from family and those on here I’m very pleased to have caught it. The play was a delight, with the puppetry, visuals and music being personal highlights. Whenever the puppets were on stage the claps and gasps from kids in the audience was really lovely. And my daughter was completely captivated. The smattering of Japanese here and there in the dialogue (names, small words & phrases), worked nicely and accents seemed generally good. Acting was also pretty good, although I found the grown woman playing a 4yr old quite odd at times; perhaps amplified as we were at the front.

If there’s one thing I found let the piece down it was that the changes made from the film generally made it worse in my opinion. This might be my love of the film bias, but so many parts that were subtle, or implied in the film had to be made explicit and explained at length in the play. New scenes like those between Kanta and his dad seemed unnecessary, and some of the characteristics of some key characters have been changed. Cutting those changes would’ve also helped with length.

All in all a fab day out and a solid 4 stars for me.

Managed to refresh the page enough times to grab a day seat for this, very glad I did.

I haven't seen the film, but it is just a very small, gentle, plot following two sisters. I'm not normally a 'slice of life' plot fan but because of the scope of the show i was absolutely fine with it. I will put under a spoiler just in case it transfers? I think it should it was very very good.

No

Stratford ?

I really know nothing about this play but everyone seems to have loved it so if it does transfer I will give it a go.