★★★★☆
A War Horse for weirdos? A Phantom for freaks? A Les Mis for misfits? No, however much I try to put this stunning new British musical into a box, it crawls out and demands to be seen as its own deliciously strange thing. Sure, there are echoes of all of the above and more besides: Shockheaded Peter, Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, any number of fairytales with fangs. Yet finally this fanciful musical adaptation of The Man Who Laughs, an 1869 novel by the Les Misérables author, Victor Hugo, mixes the comical, the grim and the shimmeringly romantic in its own way.
It’s a triumph for its director, Tom Morris, its writer, Carl Grose, and its composers, Tim Phillips and Marc Teitler,