musicals
Gary Naylor
There’s a lot of going back to the future in theatres just now - shows (like this one) postponed by 18 months or so and delayed still further by co-star Roger Bart being indisposed on press night are bringing the bright lights back to the West End. Once you read all the Covid advice sent in advance (is there an way of making it a bit less intimidating, as it’s never quite the expected blizzard of certificates and glowing QR codes on the door), we’re back to, if not quite 26 October 1985, then 26 October 2019 - and doesn’t that feel good!Doc Brown has pimped up his DeLorean with his time- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Much has happened in the five years since your reviewer braved the steep rake at The Other Palace and saw The Last Five Years (not least my now getting its “Nobody needs to know” nod in Hamilton – worth a fistful of Tonys in prestige, I guess) so it’s timely to revisit Jason Robert Brown’s musical. Jonathan O’Boyle’s 2020 production transfers from Southwark Playhouse to the Garrick Theatre, with some of the show's flaws remaining, but others addressed. The common ground is that a relatively young audience (some not much older than the work itself, now past its teenage years) loved it and that Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance. The good news is that there’s plenty here to keep grown-ups entertained as well.The show faithfully adheres to the film plot – as, indeed, it must to avoid a riot – but Jennifer Lee’s book adds more psychological depth to Elsa and Anna (Samantha Barks and Stephanie McKeon), and addresses, if doesn’t quite solve, the dramaturgical issue of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved. All of which may have played a part in its half-century long journey from screen to stage – but this new adaptation, on tour around the UK and Ireland through next spring, proves the wait was well worth it. The show's co- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Belleville has lost its Prince Charming and, when his statue is graffitied, it loses its long held title as the most beautiful town, too. Its people fear the impact on their livelihoods and soon identify the gobby, gothy girl as the culprit – they go after Cinderella with actual pitchforks! Her only friend is another misfit, Prince Sebastian, Charming’s brother, who must now be married off in an extravaganza of a royal wedding in order to provide a circus to go with the hunky baker’s bread. And so, Cinderella, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, gives the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You've got to hand it to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park: this venue never simply dusts off a familiar musical title and plonks it onstage. Their commitment to reinvestigating the material, whatever it is, has done wonders for the disparate likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jerry Herman, and Rodgers and Hammerstein remain ripe for continually fresh interpretation, as Nicholas Hytner's revelatory Carousel for the National in 1992 so agelessly proved and countless further reappraisals of their canon (the Daniel Fish Oklahoma!) have since borne out, as well. But Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Times have changed", we're informed in the cascadingly witty title number of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, now in revival at the Barbican and bringing with it a pandemic-clearing tsunami of joy.Or have they? Few I am sure would dispute the notion that the world has "gone mad today" and seems to be getting nuttier by the minute. What better climate, then, for so loving a reappraisal of a show that greets comparable verities in determinedly whackadoodle terms: the insanity unfolding aboard the designer Derek McLane's SS America sure looks preferable to the headlines from which Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’ve come to learn what socially distanced means but, 72 years ago, the distance that concerned Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers was that between racial groups in the United States. With a catalogue of hits behind them, they turned to South Pacific, and fashioned a velvet glove comprising some of musical theatre’s greatest songs into which they packed an iron fist of a condemnation of prejudice – popular entertainment with an uncompromising message. They knew they would have to stand by their principles, especially when the show toured the Jim Crow states, and they did. Their Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1966 was anyone under the age of 25, why couldn’t a teenage student write a musical in 1967? There are plenty of answers to that question of course, none of which stopped the composer Stephen Schwartz, who conjured Pippin while still at Carnegie Mellon University. By 1972, with a little help from Bob Fosse, the show was on Broadway. And now it’s back in London, having been seen here as recently as last summer. The work has lost none of its craziness in the half-century or so since it was first picking up Tonys. Pippin himself is still a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020. Wonderful, too, is this sassiest of 1950s musicals, for which those great lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green deserve almost as much credit as Bernstein for his incomparable melodies – all of them winners, melded into a musical whole which keeps the interest through the picaresque adventures of two girls from Ohio in and around New York’s Greenwich Village.Let’s get the big hitch over with first: you can’t hear enough of the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A revival of a multi-award winning musical, with a big star or two, may look like a safe choice to re-open London’s largest theatre, the Coliseum, but there was a tingle of jeopardy in the air, exemplified when the show catches you by surprise, the curtain rising when (surely) people remain in the bar? And then you notice (for the last time - hurrah!) that all those seats all around you are deliberately left unoccupied and the game’s afoot. And besides, we'd already been given a glossy, garish programme: the West End is back, baby! At first with this new reiteration of the Broadway Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The general uptick of late in film versions of stage musical hits continues apace with In the Heights, which, to my mind anyway, is far more emotionally satisfying and visually robust onscreen than it was on Broadway, where it won the 2008 Tony for Best Musical. (An Off West End version had multiple iterations, as well.) Already mired in controversy about the alleged "colourism" of its creators and the fact that its opening weekend underperformed at the box office, Jon M Chu's adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's pre-Hamilton vehicle for himself survives such discussion and transcends it, too. Read more ...