Dog Man Musical Opens in UK After Off-Broadway
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- Dog Man: The Musical has opened in the UK after an off-Broadway run, adapting Dav Pilkey's graphic novel series, which has sold more than 70 million copies in the decade since the first book was published.
- Kevin Del Aguila (writer/lyricist) and Brad Alexander (composer) built a musical-within-a-musical drawing on several early books from Pilkey's 14-title series, with direction and choreography by Jen Wineman.
- Renan Teodoro stars as Dog Man opposite Sam Kipling's villainous cat Petey and Rebecca-Jo Roberts as Li'l Petey, performing on Timothy R Mackabee's charmingly DIY cardboard-and-gaffer-tape set.
- The production leans heavily on slapstick, butt-sniffing jokes and even Dickens references, but the reviewer argues the books' moving emotional core — embodied by the character Li'l Petey — gets buried beneath the chaos.
- Mid-show, characters George and Harold try and fail to replicate Pilkey's 'flip-o-rama' comic devices onstage, lamenting 'this isn't working the way it does in the comics' — a gag the reviewer reads as a self-aware admission of the adaptation's limits.
Why it matters: For families weighing a theatre outing, the UK opening of Dog Man: The Musical delivers Pilkey's 70-million-copy slapstick faithfully but buries the pathos that gives the book series staying power — so younger fans leave laughing while the show's emotional payoff never lands.
