The Great British Bake Off Musical: a sugary soufflé that rises nicely

Wedged between James Graham’s Best of Enemies and Peter Morgan’s Patriots at the Noël Coward Theatre comes a theatrical extra slice of Bake Off – the BBC’s most avidly devoured programme at its peak and an ongoing recipe for success since its move to Channel 4 in 2017.

A musical about a competitive cake-baking series? Well if you can have a mock opera about The Jerry Springer Show or a satirical extravaganza about The X Factor (“I Can’t Sing”), why not a trilling, tongue in cheek homage to a series that made us grab our aprons and turn cake-a-holic?

I Can’t Sing curiously bombed. The expected fans didn’t show. Here, though, both the post-winter timing and central location work in this feelgood spin-off’s favour. As you watch a packed, rapturously received performance, it’s clear this is going down a treat with Bake Off-istas.

When Jake Brunger and Pippa Cleary’s lightweight concoction was served up, on a trial basis, in Cheltenham last August, my gut reaction was that it was eminently consumable, if so sugary you may need to know a good dentist – but also lacking a few ingredients. I wanted more of an inside scoop on the TV rigmarole, more flour power in the spotless cooking action, and the basic drama could be a smidgen more nail-biting.

Those requests have fallen on deaf ears. But Rachel Kavanaugh’s slick, colourful production has such a sure sense of the show’s entertainment value and limitations (it knows that it’s not Great Art, down to the cheap and cheerful choreography) that I relented, and succumbed to its good-natured zest.

Is there room for improvement? Yes. Some of the lyrics are so trite they might be generated by ChatGPT. But Brunger and Cleary display an unmistakable talent to amuse and ambush us with emotion too: pastiching a variety of musical genres to celebrate the show’s essence, and send it up, they also persuasively affirm baking as a means of overcoming life’s battles, whatever the outcome of the competition.

We follow a mock series from the eight contestants’ daunted arrival in the big tent to the final bake-off – passing through “signature”, “technical” and “show-stopper” challenges, with the Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith-like Phil Hollinghurst and Pam Lee (twinkly John Owen-Jones and a surprise cartwheeling Haydn Gwynne, both superb) wafting among the amateurs. It’s as mechanical as a barrel-organ, but you come to care for the characters even so. Aharon Rayner charms as the Syrian lad from Wembley who clings to his lucky T-shirt. Cat Sandison’s Italian teacher has you sniggering at her “bun in the oven” innuendo (there are puns aplenty) then growing moist-eyed as she warbles on about how baking became a surrogate for having kids.

Claire Moore as the elderly Eastender Babs unleashes an 11 o’clock number as delectable as a macaroon, and I went soft as a soufflé for Charlotte Wakefield as bashful Blackpool carer Gemma (getting it on with single-dad Ben). She gets the inevitable final number of self-raising belief, Rise.

Sometimes, you need Eugene O’Neill. Sometimes you just need a cake trolley.

Booking until May 13. Buy The Great British Bake Off Musical tickets