The Devil wears Prada is one of my favourite films so when I heard they were making a musical version of it I was excited to see it, but then when I heard that they had cast Vanessa Williams as Miranda Priestly I got really excited. Apart from the highly unlikely possibility of getting Meryl Streep to reprise her role from the film, Vanessa was the absolute perfect casting, She was iconic as Wilhelmina Slater in the campy TV show. Ugly Betty, a very similar role to Miranda Priestly, though with more of a comedy edge. She was ideal for a musical and a fabulous singer known for her iconic early 90s song, Save the Best for Last.

Now since it launched this musical has had VERY mixed reviews, so to be honest my expectations weren’t too high. Better to set them low and not be too disappointed I always feel. However I enjoyed it, it was faithful to the film and they had a lot of the classic quotable lines and even a few funny new ones. The cast were universally brilliant, not a single duff performance between any of them. Vanessa was everything you could hope for and the actresses who played Andy and Emily were both fantastic. The ensemble cast were marvellous. The costumes and staging were great, they’d really made an effort to make sure they held up to the high fashion looks the film had done so successfully.

However and it’s a big one, the songs were very meh, a lot of them sounded quite similar. not a single one that was particularly memorable. Elton John wrote the music and this sadly was not his best work by a long stretch. It was all entirely forgettable and really let the whole thing down. It is such a shame as the rest of production was so good, but this is meant to be a musical and sadly the key bit the music was lacking. I still enjoyed it and I’m glad I saw it, but this could have been amazing and sadly purely because of the music it’s just not. Everyone I know who has seen it has had much the same opinion as well.