By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ****

WHEN?: Saturday 13 January 2024, runs through 14 April 2024 RUNTIME: 125 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

Anyone wishing to hear some of the 90s best songs including Kiss Me by Sixpence None The Richer, Torn by Natalie Imbruglia, Lovefool by The Cardigans or Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve in musical theatre form should look no further.

• Read on for reasons including how this 90s musical creates something quite intoxicating, nostalgia-fuelled and entertaining

Cruel Intentions: The 90s Musical is a 2015 American jukebox musical based on the 1999 film of the same name starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe which was a New York-set retelling of the classic Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, already a 1988 Oscar-winning film starring Glenn Close.

With a book by writers including Roger Kumble, who wrote and directed the 1999 film, this quotes directly from it and very much like hit Heathers, which opened at this venue in 2018 before transferring into the West End, this production has its own language (‘Are you in or are you out?’ We’re in.) which fans will love.

Cruel Intentions: The 90s Musical arrives in London via New York and Los Angeles and a a sold-out, critically acclaimed production in the Assembly Palais du Variété spiegeltent at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The story is of step-siblings Kathryn Merteuil and Sebastian Valmont, manipulative monsters flushed with their own sexual prowess, who make a cruel bet: Kathryn goads Sebastian into attempting to seduce Annette Hargrove, the headmaster’s virtuous daughter.

Rhianne-Louise McCaulsky may be familiar from a West End cast of SIX and is terrific here in a role which requires her to appear to be virtuous to her classmates but to draw on Christina Aguileira’s Genie In A Bottle and Garbage’s Only Happy When It Rains to our audience to reveal how flirtatious and dark she can be.

Daniel Bravo as Valmont is pleasingly magnetic and even appears at 1 point in swimming trunks after revealing his bare buttocks to an initially apprehensive Abbie Budden as Hargrove during an early meeting.

Merteuil and Valmont also manipulate the naive and flowering Rose Galbraith as Cecile Caldwell while we also enjoyed Josh Barnett as gay schoolmate Blaine Tuttle ready to out dumb jock Greg McConnell, brought to life by Barney Wilkinson, he is secretly bedding.

We were a little disappointed however that their original song (The Backstreet Boys I Want It That Way now appearing in & Juliet) was replaced by a lesser song perhaps more familiar to a US than a UK audience.

Cruel Intentions is about people who use sexual attraction and chemistry to manipulate others and its New York high school setting still works and for fans of the film, which made more money than its Oscar-winning predecessor, may find this 90s musical uses some of the eras most beloved songs to create something quite intoxicating, nostalgia-fuelled and entertaining.

• Main picture via Facebook courtesy The Other Palace
• Have you seen Cruel Intentions before and are what did you think of this production? Tickets
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