Review: The Lightning Thief Struggles to Summon Epic-Scale Spectacle

As the stakes grow increasingly life or death, the production’s campy structure becomes less capable of supporting it.

The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical
Photo: Jeremy Daniel

“Knockoffs don’t come more transparent and slapdash than Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” wrote our own Nick Schager back in 2010, before proceeding to outline the countless ways in which Chris Columbus’s wannabe-franchise jumpstarter aped J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga “every step of the way to Mount Olympus.” Both series focus on a trio of heroes, most of whom are just discovering their magical gifts, who attend a magical institution where they’re soon embroiled in a banished evil lord’s plans. And maybe because the comparisons between them are so obvious, one gets the sense that the makers of The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical have gone to considerable lengths to distinguish their production from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

To begin with, The Lightning Thief is played almost entirely as a comedy. There are a few emotional nods to what Percy Jackson (Chris McCarrell) and his single mother, Sally (Jalynn Steele), have been going through ever since his deadbeat father abandoned them, but for the most part, it’s all talking squirrels, disco-ball sequined ferrywomen, and floods of “water” (toilet paper) spraying out into the audience. It’s also a rock musical, one that shoves malapropisms (“Tartarus? Like the fish sauce?”) into every offbeat it can.

Above all, however, The Lightning Thief is a scrappy production. There are fancy Greek columns all the way into the background of Lee Savage’s minimalist stage design, but your eye is drawn more to the graffiti and scaffolding on and surrounding them. The winged furies and the minotaur are courtesy of AchesonWalsh Studios, a Brooklyn-based creation studio, and everything else is a practical effect, most notably the centaur, Chrion (Ryan Knowles), whose hindquarters are simply left to the imagination, or the leggy costume that Sydney Maresca designed to show off the true satyr form of Grover (Jorrel Javier), Percy’s best friend.

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If The Lightning Thief’s low-budget displays soared when the show had its fleet-footed off-Broadway premiere in 2017 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, they feel smaller than they should on the stage of the Longacre Theatre. A high-stakes game of capture the flag now seems, well, childish, and leaves the menacing Hades (Knowles) as nothing more than a small man in a gold-spangled jacket. There’s only so much that David Lander’s smart lighting choices can do to disguise the fact that the characters are being dwarfed by their surroundings, either by using spotlights to focus on slivers of the stage or by adding pulsating effects to the background to make things look more active than they actually are.

The seven-person ensemble also works overtime to fill the largely empty stage, making you focus more on the way in which they’re chewing the scenery in the hopes that you don’t notice that the scenery itself is missing. Under these circumstances, only Percy and his “dream girl” campmate, Annabeth (Kristen Stokes), are given an opportunity for character growth, as they’re the only two characters whose actors aren’t feverishly changing into additional roles. They’ve got the whole show to leave an impact, but the rest of the cast often has to cram everything into a single scene, which results in them taking up broader and broader characterizations to differentiate between each new part. And the over-the-top acting also clashes with Rod Kinter’s fight choreography. Because the cast moves a mile a minute, both lyrically and physically, the action scenes are comparatively slower, making them feel like the least epic part of The Lightning Thief. As the stakes grow increasingly life or death, the production’s campy structure becomes less capable of supporting it.

All of these conflicting artistic choices really come down to a question of what story the show wants to tell. At its best, The Lightning Thief earnestly and endearingly homes in on its characters as they confront their problems, as when Percy sings through all of his insecurities and misdiagnosed ADHD in “Good Kid,” Annabeth faces down her mother Athena’s legacy in “My Grand Plan,” and all the demigod rejects of Camp Half-Blood discuss their irresponsible godly parents in “The Campfire Song.” Less effective, particularly given the stakes of its plot, is how the show keeps splitting off into superficial, comic tangents, as when Dionysus (Javier) jazzily rattles off the things he hates about his demigod charges in “Another Terrible Day” or Charon (Steele) summarizes the Underworld in “D.O.A.” as she takes the kids to meet Hades.

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All this jokiness is so intrusive that it becomes difficult to take Percy’s angst seriously. There are moments of sincerity and hilarity throughout the show, but the handling of the tonal shifts is so whiplash-inducing that the conclusion, perhaps inevitably, falls flat. Percy’s reconciliation with his long-absent father, Poseidon (Knowles), ought to be a dramatic conclusion to everything Percy’s been singing about. But because Poseidon is so cartoonishly depicted as a way-cool surfer dude, one who casually resurrects Percy’s instantly horny mother for good measure, this meeting is about as emotionally satisfying as it could have been.

The Lightning Thief is also hampered by the creators adapting an existing, well-known novel into a stage production, as opposed to building something new from scratch, as was done for Harry Potter. Rob Rokicki’s music and lyrics do their best to save time, compressing the whole cross-country road trip from Long Island to Los Angeles almost entirely into a single song, “Drive,” but that just forces Joe Tracz’s script to do a lot of expositional lifting between songs, leaving little time to develop characters like Luke (Rodriguez), Hermes’s apparently bitter son. Things that may have worked on the page or on the silver screen like the Oracle, feel shoehorned into an overstuffed production already teeming with monsters and motorcycles.

The wittily quipped premise of The Lightning Thief is that “normal is a myth,” but the truth is that this little-production-that-could makes the book’s myths seem normal. No matter how hard the cast tries to spice things up—or perhaps because of all that visible effort—it’s just a glass of watered-down ambrosia, slightly amusing, but never fully entertaining.

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The Lightning Thief is now playing at the Longacre Theatre.

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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