The Great British Bake Off brings its cake-filled drama to London’s West End

LONDON – “In the beginning, there was flour,” say two cavemen as they make a Victoria sponge cake on an open fire. 

Thus starts The Great British Bake Off Musical. From there, it only gets loopier. Describing any scene sounds like you are recounting a dream you had while on heavy medication. If you have wondered how a boxing match between two scones might play out or what focaccia self-portraits might look like, you will soon have your answer. 

This musical is adapted from the runaway success that is The Great British Bake Off (2010 to present) television show, which first aired on BBC Two. 

The show, now on Channel 4 in Britain, is shown across the world, and local editions are made in 35 territories. It has clocked as many as 14 million viewers in Britain.

The musical, on the West End at the Noel Coward Theatre, was adapted by Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary and directed by Rachel Kavanaugh. 

Like the TV show, the musical revolves around a group of contestants battling it out each week with three baking challenges: the signature (a twist on a classic), the technical (making a basic dish perfectly) and the showstopper (unusual creations heavy on decoration).

Every week, the weakest contestant is sent home, while the best is crowned “star baker”.

The musical’s star judges, Phil Hollinghurst and Pam Lee, are thinly veiled versions of the TV show’s Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith. They are instantly recognisable, both through accurate portrayals – Hollywood’s stiff, macho swagger and Leith’s plummy voice are well-observed – and excellent costumes.

Hollinghurst, played by John Owen-Jones, is decked out in biker leather, while Hayden Gwynne’s Lee wears chunky glasses and even chunkier necklaces.

The sets are brilliant too: The pastel-coloured cooking benches become dynamic moving props in the famous tent, which is suggested through a metal frame. 

The contestants are composite characters of people viewers have seen on the show. They are mostly drawn as one-note types – there is the Vegan One, the Posh One, the Granny – but overall, they fairly accurately portray the sorts of contestants that have appeared in the series.

The play’s writers have described the musical as a “lost series of Bake Off” that “has not yet been aired”.

The show is at its most fun when it gently ribs the franchise’s cliches, sending up the confusing recipes given to contestants and parodying the hosts’ lame comedy monologues. But halfway through, it breaks from that format and launches into sob stories for a few of the contestants, which feel jarring in a show that is otherwise (tent)wall-to-(tent)wall sniggers over “soggy bottoms”, an ongoing joke in the TV series that may or may not be referencing cakes.  

The drama might have been folded in to disguise the show’s overall lightness on plot. If there is any underlying thesis here, it would be about what it means to be British in 2023 – particularly through the storyline of a Syria-born contestant.

The seeming answer, unsurprisingly, is that it can vary. On the one hand, Britishness might be determined by the amount of twee butterfly cakes you can produce. On the other hand, it is how close you can come to living like a ribald, gin-soaked Hogarth painting come to life. 

If you have seen the TV show, you will be familiar with its cheeky, innuendo-led humour. On stage, that has been ramped up significantly. Even non-prudish viewers might be shocked by a contestant’s song chronicling her lust for Hollinghurst/Hollywood.

The difficulty in this show (the technical challenge, if you will) is how to accurately portray the baking, given the show’s almost 2½-hour run. There is no time for breads to rise or cakes to be baked and decorated to Bake Off standards.

According to the producers, about 140 prop bakes appear in each show. They are mixed, kneaded and, at one point, slapped repeatedly.

Whenever the show breaks into a dance number, the bakes are discarded and the actors stir empty bowls, a contrivance that feels less like bakers baking and more like children pretending. 

Ultimately, though, it is a very fun and funny production. 

While the TV show sticks close to a quaint view of Britain as a land of village cake fairs and traditions, the musical chooses a broad version of its home turf, depicting a national culture of daytime TV and trashy amusement parks besides cucumber sandwiches and the royals. Which is British to its jammy middle. BLOOMBERG