Elf, Dominion Theatre, London, review: Absurdly expensive musical is a ridiculous hoot

An exhilarating and sharp satire of those Christmas films in which a parent thaws and bonds with a wayward child

Ben Forster as Buddy and Kimberley Walsh as Jovie (Alastair Muir)

Should this stage musical version of the popular 2003 movie starring Will Ferrell come with a stern Elf warning or be dispensed generally on the National Elf? For my own taste, I should say that an enlightened answer would tend much nearer to the latter extreme of that spectrum . True, it sounds a tad paradoxical to suggest that a show which has become notorious for breaking records for the price of premium tickets spreads tonic happiness that it should come to folk “free at the point of use”. And there is something more than little grating to be advised a portion of the £267.50 one would have to fork out to be assured of total seating sanctity will find its way into the Restoration Levy. For a spleen-splitting sum like that, I would want a new fringe theatre constructed and named after me in neon lights.

Alastair Muir (Alastair Muir)

On the other hand, the show – with a buoyant knowing score by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelen, and a winkingly mischievous book by Thomas Meehan – strikes me as a ridiculous hoot: a silly, exhilarating and affectionately sharp satire of all those films and plays in which a parent thaws and bonds with a wayward child over a fraught Holiday Season. Work in this gentre have been upping the ante on troubled relationship between awkward progenitors and progeny. In the glorious mess of the movie, Hook, Steven Spielberg took this to the ultimate by having Robin Williams as the uptight father gradually coming round from the anaesthetic of the suburban grind to the realisation that he once was (the now repressed) Peter Pan.

Alastair Muir (Alastair Muir)

Not far south of this, Elf asks you to imagine that the iced-over executive of a children's book company in NYC (Joe McGann), fighting to keep his job and estranged by work from his 12 year old by, is suddenly confronted with the son that resulted f a distant college fling. The twist is that this figure is an Elf on his mother's side. In a vividly discomfort-inducing and very winning stellar performance by Ben Forster, Buddy is 30 going on 4. There's the ludicrous clatter of L-plates as he tries to catch up on the human pleasures of cuddling up to Daddy and to Kimberley Walsh's lovely Sophie. At first, as Buddy outs fake Santas in Macy's where he's a helper and takes to Yuletide interior decorating like an arsonist to bonfires, I thought 10 minutes of his company would be like being trapped in a lift for 5 years with Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Anderson mode. But the show – with its spoofy razmattazz score, brazenly talented brass section and elatingly idiotic choreography – has a core of genuine, touching charm and innocence.

It understands that, at whatever age, we are shifting palimpsests of ourselves. Just as a cross-section of an adult may still be want to believe in Father Christmas – so a child can have an intuition of the sophisticated joys to come and want to brush bodies with that future person. I would have been a stretcher case of joy if I had come across a show like this when I was 12.

To 2 January; 020 7927 0900