Freaky Friday The Musical Review

Review by James

Disney’s body-switching comedy of magic, mother-daughter bonding and eventual valuing of what’s important is happily, currently receiving a renaissance across the mediums. This summer, the fan wish-fulfilment sequel, Freakier Friday, nostalgically and successfully reunited Jamie-Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan 22 years after their excellent 2003 remake of the 1976 original, adapted from the source material of Mary Rodgers’s novel.

Rebecca Lock and Jena Pandya. Photo by Mark Senior

Now, as is almost customary, a known property or franchise, obtains the musical treatment. After playing several states and cities in the US from 2016-17 (Virginia, California, Atlanta, Cleveland and Houston), producers had planned to take it to Broadway. Although that transfer is yet to come to fruition, Manchester’s modernist multi-purpose arts complex, HOME, is playing host to its refreshed UK premiere.

It has a prestigious team overseeing it – music and lyricist double-act Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey had colossal success on both Broadway and in the West End with family adversity of a far more serious kind in Next To Normal – and enjoy constructing a much lighter confection here, although there is occasional edge.

The basic premise is still the same, although character names and their professions have been changed for the stage version. Ellie and her mother Katherine, (Jena Pandya and Rebecca Lock), switch bodies and lives for one day, (one’s still a student, here her mother’s a celebration baker, while preparing for her own nuptials), as both learn how it feels to be in the other’s shoes.

Pandya outshines everyone, terrifically polished and expressive as Ellie, with one of those classic, emotive voices full of pathos, ideally suited to Disney, and an illustrious career ahead of her. Lock is good as her mother, going from organised to stroppy, but lacks Curtis’s dynamism and absolute balance between broad and precise, when conveying the two personas.

The cast of Freaky Friday. Photo by Mark Senior.

Andy Fickman (having directed many studio films at Disney, including the hilarious, vastly underrated You Again, also starring Curtis) has a production that fizzes with so much effervescent delivery, with lyrics sung a such a lick, you wish most of Kitt’s songs would slow down slightly. But ‘I Got This’, a mambo-esque ode to how to optimistically negotiate the curse cast upon them, and ‘Oh Biology’, a desperate ballad about a mother suddenly being thrust back into the complexity of school-teenage angst, are two of the best.

The magical element of exactly how their exchange is manifested, has assumed various guises over the adaptations, from fortune cookie clues and riddles, to a fortune-teller’s premonition in a crystal ball. Here, an hourglass is instrumental in initiating the changeover. That sequence is staged simply, but only somewhat effectively. While it doesn’t exaggerate the dramatic pathetic fallacy device, by conjuring a lightning storm right on cue, there’s a slight hollowness not only to how this pivotal moment is realised, but also to how the subsequent transference proceeds between the two leads. Above all, my main observation was, there just wasn’t enough delineation distinguishing between the strait-laced mother suddenly becoming the rebellious teenage daughter, or vice versa – no credit card shopping spree, or indeed makeover into rocker hairstyle and costuming - both of which Curtis did in the film – even though that’s what’s shown on the musical’s poster. Consequently, there’s never quite enough clarity as to who’s pretending to be who, which can confuse, but only at times.

Ironically, its those archetypes which exist elsewhere which can feel overdone. For instance, once we’re in the high-school setting, there’s still the beautiful girl who’s the plastic bully, the popular heartthrob (whose very name every time he appears is played for lovestruck, swooning laughs), the shy one and the endearingly loveable class clown. The student characters all speak in a lexicon where everything is ‘lame’ or ‘totes amaze’. I haven’t seen Mean Girls or Legally Blonde, but I assume the vernacular there is very much the same. These Americanisms won’t bother the many young fans at the performance I attended at all, but I thought Bridget Carpenter’s book could’ve had a little more variation.

However, the ensemble, even though some are stuck with thinly drawn characters, are extremely energetic, particularly in Alexzandra Sarmiento’s choreography, especially the slow-motion tableaux’s with the students, usually in the time-turning sequences or moments of celebratory triumph.

Jena Pandya and Rebecca Lock. Photo by Mark Senior.

There are many inventive lyrics from Yorkey, which are often contemporary, without being too modernised, and do surprise with that aforementioned edge: ‘Fox News? The shame!’ or ‘It may be ADHD, ADD or STDs!’, in one particular highlight, the song ‘Somebody Has Got To Take The Blame’ set at a parents evening.

Listen out for a breezy, yuletide-themed ‘please turn off your phone’ announcement, demonstrative of a mother’s zeitgeist attempts to be on the button: ‘Lets sing a Christmas carol and post it on tic-tac!’.
David Sheilds’s angular, clock-centric set design, goes from domestic pastels to start, to Day-Glo fluorescence to end.

Overall, its fun and uplifting, flawed and a little cliched in its writing, and its tendency to turn energy levels up to 11 (apart from in ‘Parents Lie’, another edgier, thankfully much slower number, which isn’t afraid to extrapolate the imperfection of parenting). Its best moments are either its most subtle, or its witty lyricism. It's built-in popularity and captive audience should ensure it succeeds both at HOME and abroad.

⭐⭐⭐

Freaky Friday runs until 10th January 2026. Tickets are available from https://homemcr.org/whats-on/freaky-friday-yhdl