Or rather he takes a tumble in this musical version that takes its inspiration from the characters created by Miguel de Cervantes. Alas, Chris Bond's approach is so much tilting at windmills and can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a rude slapstick comedy or a serious attempt to look at all the evil perpetrated in the name of religion. In the end it is neither, just another bland ballad-driven tale about two nice chaps - Matthew Kelly as Don Quixote and George Costigan as Sancho Panza - revolving around in circles perched on giant wooden horsey tricycles.
Bond's conception of Don Quixote as a free thinker living through dangerous times whose dreams are deemed a heresy by the Spanish Inquisition is a potentially interesting one, but it is handled heavy-handedly. Curiously for a show in which the hero thinks for himself, this is a show that is always telling the audience what to think - there's even a little dig at the new Pope.
This wouldn't matter if the evening was much more exuberant and energetic, but the whole staging lacks the physicality necessary for slapstick and the script is as witless as it is aimless and episodic. The only real sign of imagination is in Ellen Cairns' clever set, which offers lines of washing being hung out to dry, and trees constructed of ropes. She is the real dreamer in this production.
Kelly and Costigan never manage to get the little-and-large double act going, and have so little character to play with that they never connect with each other, let alone the audience. It is left to the community performers to inject some oomph into the proceedings, sometimes by sheer weight of numbers and sometimes because several of the women really do sing like larks.
Even so, it all raises the question: why do a community show that has no connection or context for the community who are performing it and watching it? If a theatre's community show doesn't really spring from the community, except in supplying some of the performers, surely it is no more than upmarket amateur dramatics? And if that is the case, why not simply have done with it and put on a crowd-pleaser such as Annie and make lots of little girls and their mums very happy?
· Until July 9. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
