One of the first theater reviews of “Shrek: The Musical” has been written by Variety’s Lynn Jacobson.  The musical is in tryouts in Seattle before heading to Broadway.  Jacobson gives it an overall good review, extolling the virtues of the set design, costumes, and puppets as well as the performers.  She says it plays very closely to the screenplay, except that a

bit of backstory has been added in the first act for some of the main characters, as well as a few seemingly pointless song-and-dance numbers. For instance, the fairy-tale characters who invade Shrek’s swamp are introduced with a “Chorus Line”-like piece (“The Line-Up”) that’s neither particularly entertaining nor effective in moving the story forward.

Nothing about “The Line-Up” or the bland opener “Big Bright Beautiful World” prepares you for a handful of flat-out terrific numbers that follow. The first of these is Lord Farquaad’s “Things Are Looking Up in Duloc,” which the monumentally talented Sieber performs entirely on his knees, with the help of clever costuming to appear suitably short.

She does complain that although Sutton Foster (Fiona) and Brian D’Arcy James (Shrek) have wonderful chemistry, Shrek’s relationship with Donkey (played by Chester Gregory) barely get off the ground.

For some reason, the grumpy-ogre-plus-pesky-sidekick formula that worked so well for Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy in the movie falls flat here, not helped by the static staging of some of their scenes. (Their passage across a little footbridge to the dragon’s lair seems particularly stilted and awkward.) Or it could be that the role of the donkey would be better suited to a character actor than to a singer-dancer — even one as accomplished as Gregory.

Read the rest of the review here to get Jacobson’s complete analysis of Shrek as musical.