Mackintosh’s ‘Moby Dick’ Harpooned : Stage: Critics skewer mega-producer’s show, the only original musical scheduled to open in the city’s theater district this year. But it receives a standing ovation from the audience.

Moby Dick has been harpooned at last--not by the obsessed Captain Ahab, but by London critics reviewing Tuesday’s opening night of the new stage musical from mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh (“Cats,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Miss Saigon”).

The arrival of a new show from Mackintosh is now, by its nature, a huge event in London’s West End. But the fact that “Moby Dick, a Whale of a Tale” is the only original musical scheduled to open in the city’s theater district this year has added even greater weight.

“Moby Dick,” as presented by Mackintosh, tells the campy story of a nearly impoverished girls boarding school that, to raise funds, stages its own musical version of the Herman Melville classic in the school swimming pool on parents’ day. There is much gender-bending as the girls--some played by boys--play the sailors and all the other parts. Tony Monopoly stars as headmistress Dorothy Hyman and Captain Ahab, resulting in a man playing a woman playing a man.

“ ‘Moby Dick’ . . . is the latest nail to be driven into the glittering coffin of the West End musical,” wrote the reviewer for the Guardian newspaper. “Lacking logic, style, coherence or sense, it turns Melville’s great Dostoyevskyan novel into a campy, vulgar schoolgirl spoof in which lines like ‘Three years at sea and still no sign of Dick’ signal the level of sophistication.”

“With over 40 musicals in production round the globe, the philanthropic impresario Cameron Mackintosh can afford to take a risk,” said the Daily Express. “And this, chaps and chapesses, is it. Written by two unknowns, this no-star show is a camp and garish folly.”

Said the Times of London: “It is like being sucked into somebody’s very silly, very private joke. . . . The effect is of a vehicle whose tires have gone pop: revving, overheating, going nowhere.”

And the Daily Telegraph was barely kinder: “It is hard to imagine this damp squib of a show exploding triumphantly round the world like such previous Mackintosh successes as ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ . . . It is impossible not to warm to this young and heroically enthusiastic company, but I fear they are sailing on a sinking ship.”

What most of the reviewers failed to note was that the show received a standing ovation from the audience. But even those who did note the popular appeal dismissed it.

“As people around me leapt to their feet to acclaim this garbage,” wrote the Guardian reviewer, “I wondered what they would do if confronted by a genuinely spirit-lifting piece of musical theater by Mozart or Rossini. Presumably, die of shock.”

In general, the critics were kinder in their assessments of the show’s music than the production as a whole.

Mackintosh responded to the reviews with a brief statement: “The critics have had their say. Now the public will have theirs.”

And so, the question now comes down to this: Can London theatergoers Save the Whale?