Christopher Gray enjoys city’s first amateur production of popular musical

Fizzingly physical, camply comic and with its heart ever in the right place, Legally Blonde The Musical roars into the New Theatre this week in a production that can’t fail to delight and impress. Newly released to the amateur stage, the show gets its South East premiere in this style in the practised hands of Oxford Operatic Society.

Musically adept and with tight choreography that is daring in every sense of the word, this is entertainment guaranteed to lift the spirits. It is a credit to all the performers, and to Guy Brigg, its director, and the musical director Julie Todd and her players.

The life-affirming story, as most will know, was first told in a novel by Amanda Brown that was subsequently turned into a film and then worked into a stage production with music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin, and book by Heather Hach.

It focuses on Californian sorority babe Elle Woods — call her a bimbo at your peril, though a penchant for pink and for pampered pooches such as her chihuahua Bruiser does rather mark her out as the kind. Not to mention — as of course one must — the crowning glory of her golden tresses.

In terms of looks all is properly presented in the knock-out performance by Nicola Blake, the head of performing arts at Abingdon and Witney College.

Her acting and singing are top-notch too.

Dumped by her ambitious and classy boyfriend Warner (Guy Grimsley) as not being quite the thing for one bound for Harvard Law School, and to the heights of American society thereafter, Elle decides to follow him there and win him back.

This is not so easy since he is already in the clutches of rich-bitch Vivienne (Natalie Mullins), who certainly knows how to pull rank in legal and social affairs.

Happily, Elle can rely on the support of good-sort Emmett (Freddie Cambanakis) who is able to set her on the path to legal success, even as she deals with his difficulties over matters sartorial.

No need to guess how the story ends, though there is quite a lot of plot on the way. This includes Elle’s successful defence on a murder rap of fitness guru Brooke Wyndham (Libby Holcroft), having sorted out gropey lecturer Callahan (Dave Crewe), who first has charge of the case.

Meanwhile, our heroine’s all-important hairdresser Paulette (Katie Bedborough) finds happiness in the arms of strutting mailman stud Kyle (Phil Weller).

A deserved reward we might think, for one who prevents our blonde’s fatal conversion into a brunette.

In so doing, she upholds the principal ‘message’ of the show, which might be summarised in Polonius’s words of advice in Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.”

Legally Blonde
New Theatre, Oxford
Until Saturday
0844 871 3020, atgtickets.com/oxford