When Jude Kelly transposed The Wizard of Oz from screen to stage, one of the many pleasures of the joyous result was the ingenious way she intercut film and live action, one medium making a seamless commentary upon the other.
The RSC and many other theatre companies have already travelled the Yellow Brick Road with varying degrees of success, but few have brought to it the technological chutzpah of Kelly. But despite (or possibly because of) the evening's reliance on technology, in particular film and video, it ends up competing with the familiar movie images running in your head rather than feeling like theatre's original take on a film classic.
It reminds me of those Fringe shows that were all the rage about a decade ago - they kept trying to pretend they were really movies.
Where Kelly's evening works best in its wizardry is at the interface of the two artforms. Kelly artlessly employs those old Forkbeard Fantasy tricks of interweaving live action and film so that the witchy Miss Gultch is one moment seen peddling across an endless Kansas landscape and is then peddling across the stage all in one seamless sequence.
But the evening is so busy showing off its box of tricks - puffs and pops, witches disappearing, folk from the Kansas homestead morphing into the inhabitants of Oz, a spooky virtual wizard courtesy of a virtual Patrick Stewart - that it forgets to get down to the basic storytelling. The whole thing is amazing, but also so frenetic you feel quite exhausted just watching it.
It also tends to make the actors seem irrelevant. They certainly seem awfully far away, marooned behind screens and cut off from the audience. I only got a good look at Dorothy's pert, pretty face when she came out for her curtain call, and no one would hear her warbling Over the Rainbow if she wasn't, like the rest of the cast, heavily miked.
There are moments when it really works, particularly with the lo-tech puppet munchkins, who look like wizened old babies. If you like theatre that makes you go ooh and ah and wonder "How did they do that?", you will be over the rainbow. My heart still belongs to the film.
· Until April 13. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
