Ingrid and Adrian got tickets to a musical, Snow White at Göta Lejon, as a birthday present. Today we saw the show.

We were incredibly disappointed. I can’t judge exactly how disappointed the others were but the feeling I walked away with was that this is the last time I want to see a Dröse & Norberg production, ever.

The songs were mediocre at best, with sloppily written texts that neither scanned nor rhymed well. Often I couldn’t hear what the actors were singing; I don’t know whether that was because they didn’t sing clearly enough or because the sound producers and engineers hadn’t done their job properly. All songs sounded pretty much the same, anyway, all bouncy and energetic but with no soul or feeling. After the show ended, I couldn’t recall a single line of a single song.

The actors (apart from Nanne Grönvall as the witch/queen) were all rather unimpressive. Snow White, the king, the hunter/herald and the prince were all bland and uninteresting. The dwarves were like weird twisted copies of the Disney dwarves, obviously the writers didn’t have any new ideas but couldn’t make them too close to get caught by copyright rules.

As an added insult, the story had been padded with random scenes (singing, dancing plushy toys?!) that contributed nothing apart from an opportunity to sell merchandise to children.

The only thing that I really liked about the show were the queen’s costumes, each more regal and extravagant than the previous ones. (Whoever designed the prince’s jacket, on the other hand, has obviously never looked at a men’s formal jacket up close, because they had cut it completely straight and quite narrow and with no vents, so it was pulling quite badly at the bottom button.)

After the performance we went for dinner at a nearby restaurant (Ri Cora) which has one of Stockholm’s best Asian buffets, and we all came home with much stronger and happier memories of the dinner than of the musical.