Review: The Wizard of Oz

Andrew Lloyd Webber has done it again - that is, as with his previous blockbuster, Love Never Dies, he has produced a show that first fills you with awe and then washes it down with an emotional sedative. While the eyes boggle, the mind drifts.

That said, this Wizard of Oz is a triumph of ambition, if the ambition is to create spectacle. Jeremy Sams's technically brilliant production moves with seamless ease from a sepia Kansas to a colour-saturated Oz via a superbly staged - well, filmed - tornado scene.

It is here that Hannah Waddingham's nasty Mrs Gulch turns into the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West, her bike into a broom, the friendly local mechanicals into Scarecrow without a brain (Paul Keating), Tin Man without a heart (Edward Baker-Duly) and Lion sans his courage (David Ganly). And it is also here that the impression builds to certainty that there is something essential missing from this show.

Danielle Hope - winner of the BBC casting show, Over the Rainbow, which so generously gave this £5 million pound production many more millions of pounds worth of free publicity - delivers a sweet-voiced Dorothy. No one in their right mind would compare her to Judy Garland, but just a smidgeon of Garland's vulnerability and yearning would have gone down a treat with the pitch-perfect professionalism with which Hope delivers one of the show's stand-out songs, Over the Rainbow. An under-employed Michael Crawford as a Kansas traveling showman and the eponymous Wizard musters what charm he can during his half hour or so of stage time.