The Bodyguard The Musical

The Bodyguard The Musical is less a fully realised stage show and more of a jukebox tribute shoehorned with more Whitney Houston songs than you can poke a 'best of' album at.

This adaptation, based on the 1992 blockbuster film starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner, comes to the Sydney stage with an all-Australian cast (quite the rarity in Aussie musical theatre at present) after being conceived and debuted in London's West End.

The story is simple and iconic enough to be known by even those of us who aren't ardent fans of the movie original. Hardass professional bodyguard Frank Farmer (Kip Gamblin) is enlisted to protect Academy Award-nominated music superstar Rachel Marron (Paulini Curuenavuli), who is being harassed by increasingly unhinged threats from a deranged stalker. Frank is initially reluctant about the job of babysitting an entitled diva, but of course, he sticks around and they inevitably fall in love.

This production explodes onto the stage with a startling amount of pyrotechnics, strobe lighting, confetti and a surplus of ripped bodies amongst the backup dancers. But this onslaught of flash, swagger and OTT musical numbers is not enough to distract from the breakneck narrative pacing, muddled era and shallowly developed characters.

Paulini, our Aussie darling of old school Australian Idol fame, is the saving grace of this production, hitting all the right notes with her portrayal of Rachel and soaring to meet all of Whitney's most demanding numbers - absolutely no small feat.

Kip Gamblin is appropriately stoic as Frank, but there's a niggling sense that he has more to offer than this role allows. Any chance the pair have at serving up some serious chemistry is unfortunately lost to the aforementioned pacing issues, with the film's subtle build of rousing passion swept away in the stage edit. It ends up feeling rather watered down and plenty of knowingly dramatic scenes are rendered downright confusing by the haste of the storytelling. Rachel's sweet yet spiteful sister Nicki is another character lost to a butchered script, however Prinnie Stevens' musical performances redeem her to the point of almost eclipsing Paulini.

This show is at its best when it is at its most self-aware. In one scene, a trio of drunk girls in a karaoke bar gleefully stumble their way through Houston's Where Do Broken Hearts Go? These absolute scene stealers are the actualisation of this production's target demographic - tipsy, chatty gangs of friends who are happy to be blinded by the spectacle and nostalgia of the music and dismiss the lacking integrity of the rest of the show. 

The way the girls fall over themselves to rip out their phones and snap a shot of their favourite superstar upon the realisation that they are in the presence of Rachel Marron herself (on a secret date with Frank) is adorable. But the technology spells out another confusing element of this show - what era is it anyway? I get where they're going by contemporising things with camera phones and social media, but the music is so iconically '90s and Rachel Marron is such an iconically '90s star. If you're going to transplant this show into a contemporary setting, it surely requires a more thorough adjustment than a smattering of iPhones? As for the costumes, they remain reverent to the cinematic source material, which again, throws a confusing light on the intended period.

Perhaps The Bodyguard should have dared to keep its tongue firmly planted in cheek for the whole of the show - between a lacklustre re-enactment of the iconic scene where Frank rescues Rachel amid a riot breaking out in a club and a tasteless inclusion of pre-recorded slow-mo video projection, it could be difficult to judge what was meant to be adorable campiness and what was a tacky misfire.

Prepare to keep your expectations low for this show as a whole. But if you can't resist the novelty of Paulini paying tribute to Whitney Houston in her most famous role, and you're prepared for a certain level of cringe, you're in for a good time.

The Bodyguard The Musical plays till 25 Jun at Sydney Lyric Theatre.