Fans of Cobra Kai and the Karate Kid franchise will love this show! Of all the musicals I’ve ever seen that are based on movies, this is one of the ones that stayed closest to the source material and did a very good job at following all the major plot points and beats of the film it is based on.
Of course, there are some differences, and you should check out my article where I break down all of the major differences in plot from the movie to the musical which is up on this site now.
I saw the show as part of it’s UK Tour at the New Theatre Oxford, and I’m happy to say that I had a blast throughout. It was a pretty faithful adaptation, and the plot still held up when adapted on stage. The songs were good with a mix of emotional moments and cool bad ass Cobra Kai and combat songs. The stage combat was also a highlight which is a good thing considering it is a show based around martial arts.
The plot still follows Daniel LaRusso who is a teenager who has moved to California from New Jersey with his mother. Very quickly, Daniel meets Ali, who is his love interest, but problems occur when her ex-boyfriend Johnny Lawrence shows up.
For fans who have just watched Cobra Kai, both the original film and this musical serve as something of an origin story for Daniel and Johnny, and the musical does a good job to retain almost everything from the characters so if you’d never seen the film of the Karate Kid, these characters would still be recognisable to fans of Cobra Kai.
Now, I did say almost, and if I have one nit pick it is that LaRusso is much more of a dork in this adaptation than the hot head than he was in the original film. Add to that that the minor character of Freddie is an even bigger dork wad and a tad too musical theatre in the version I saw. This may come down to the actors playing the roles, but I expect this was done to make them seem more likeable and more traditional musical theatre characters. Gino Ochello plays LaRusso in the tour, and he does a good job, even if he plays LaRusso as much more bumbling. I would have liked to have seen this change of approach lead to a much more confident version of the character by the end, but the contrast didn’t quite hit where I think they must have been aiming.
The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai franchises obviously lean much more towards appealing to a male audience, so the show did a good job to retain most of that whilst softening Daniel just a touch which I imagine gives him more of a romantic comedy lead vibe to appeal to chicks.
Real dudes need not worry though as there is plenty of karate action and fight sequences throughout. For the most part this was all pretty exciting, although I do question why from a stage combat perspective, they mostly relied on vocal reactions to punctuate the hits and kicks rather than more traditional naps. Naps, for those unaware is the stage combat term for making a sound effect physically by slapping or smacking a part of your body as your perform a punch or a kick to add a sound effect to sell the attack.
Adrian Pang plays Mr Miyagi with a great sense of calm and gravitas which is what the role needs. He perhaps didn’t quite achieve the same presence as Pat Morita, but he was able to hit all of the right notes to do the character justice.
One cool aspect of the show was that Mr Miyagi had a group of karate back up dancers. This doesn’t quite explain them, but they were an ensemble all dressed in karate gis, who had no character other than to support the actions of Mr Miyagi…So yeah, karate back up dancers. Their role was to almost act as the special effects than enhanced and amplified the karate moves of Me Miyagi. The best way I can explain it is when you play a video game like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter and you do something very fast or powerful and you see a shadow of or echo of a character’s movements. That’s what the Karate dancers did.
Song wise, my favourites were the ones that showed off the fighting. Strike Hard, Strike First, No Mercy with Cobra Kai was probably the best, and the act one finale sung by Krease with Johnny got me pumped for the second half. Certainly there were also good songs for LaRusso, and Mr Miyagi, and there were some more emotional and character driven songs from Daniel’s mum, songs between Daniel and Ali, and one that dove more into the death of Mr Miyagi’s wife and son.
I liked how they used stand out moments from the movie like Wax On Wax Off for a song, and the choreography in the show was generally very good.
The original Karate Kid movie was a balance (no pun intended) between martial arts film and drama and I think the musical also balances these aspects well whilst including enough good singing and dancing to broaden the appeal of the show.
I think this is something that both Karate Kid and Cobra Kai fans would enjoy as well as general musical theatre audiences and in fact would probably be a good gateway for more theatre fans to find themselves into the world of Cobra Kai.
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