Elton John’s The Devil Wears Prada musical can’t improve on the film

The songs don’t stick, and the fashion is more The Only Way Is Essex than made in Milan.

I don’t know much about fashion, but the costumes in Elton John and Jerry Mitchell’s musical adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada are more The Only Way Is Essex than made in Milan. In the unimprovable film, based on Lauren Weisberger’s book inspired by her time spent as Anna Wintour’s assistant, the miserable women at “Runway Magazine” looked devastatingly chic – it viciously criticised the fashion industry, but it constantly showed you its art and intelligence too. In this stage version, the models in the climactic Paris Fashion Week scene, hairspray and foundation aplenty, wear floor-length chiffon ballgowns in purple and pink, like casino babes in a 1970s Bond film.

The West End is always coming up with new ways to stay alive, casting Hollywood A-listers in Shakespeare plays or bringing Stranger Things and Harry Potter to the stage. But those two were new scripts: The Devil Wears Prada has imported the 2006 movie almost word for word, losing the fat jokes and adding songs. The hair-raising speech about cerulean, a shade of blue, is thankfully intact – but so is the line, repeated in my house whenever the cheese comes out of the fridge, when Andy rejects her boyfriend’s cheese toastie and he says, “There’s about eight dollars of Jarlsberg in that.”

Yet they have lost the complexity of the young Andy’s relationship with the boss from hell. Vanessa Williams’s Miranda Priestly is not the monster Meryl Streep made her – just a powerful woman struggling in a mean industry. The line “I see a lot of myself in you” is delivered with sympathy, when in the movie it made your blood run cold. Georgie Buckland is a more gung-ho Andy than Anne Hathaway. She has to be – she’s always singing. But, like too many new musicals, the songs don’t stick, and apart from a riff that recalls “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”, they don’t even sound much like Elton’s. It’s a warm blanket of a show and never boring – but read the book: it’s wilder and angrier than the film.

The Devil Wears Prada
Dominion Theatre, London W1
Until 31 May 2025