musicals
Jasper Rees
We’ve had the pre-release hoopla. We’ve had the gruellingly inevitable backlash. We’ve had, as an additional sideshow, the brief interlude when it was this year’s best picture at the Academy Awards, until it wasn’t. The time has now come for La La Land to embark on a long and doubtless fruitful afterlife as a home entertainment, and the arguments about the stars' abilities as musical performers can continue on the world’s sofas.You’ve seen it in the cinema. What do you get when you take the film home? On the DVD the extras include a mini-doc on Los Angeles and the homage the film pays to it, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It used to be said that the devil had all the best music. But the devil seems to have lost his touch in this ghost-story rock musical from Duncan Sheik, composer of the stage version of American Psycho and the award-laden Spring Awakening. If the plot seems familiar, it’s because it is – in essence, anyway. An isolated location. Childhood innocence in peril. Malevolent ghosts with a score to settle. Another American abroad tied up that narrative package more than a century ago in The Turn of the Screw.But the main problem with Whisper House, which premiered in San Diego in 2010 and here Read more ...
David Benedict
“Then I’ll kiss her so she’ll know.” At the sound of his ringing voice, the girls part to reveal him standing there, a hapless monument of rumpled charm. The audience relaxes in pleasure as an easeful actor joyfully shows what you can do with a command of textual detail, physicality and, above all, character. The trouble is, the excellent Gavin Spokes is playing not one of the leads but the supporting role of Mr Snow. The downside of a performance this assured is that it shows you exactly what has been missing until now.To a degree, this is a gamble that has paid off – the emphasis is on the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can London support two dance musicals, each one dazzling in a different way? We're about to find out, now that the mother of all toe-tappers, 42nd Street, has set up shop a jeté or two away from where An American in Paris is achieving balletic lift-off. Similar generically but as different in content and approach as two major Broadway transplants to the West End can be, 42nd Street proves decisively that sometimes bigger really is better. You can scale back Sondheim and the like to rending effect, but when it comes to the sheer synchronised splendour accompanying an army of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
What’s in a yellow dress? Hope over experience? Reckless confidence? This is a legitimate question when the second big cross-Atlantic people-pleaser hoves into view featuring a girl in a frock of striking daffodil hue. It doesn’t take a degree in semiotics to translate this. Forget the bad stuff, people. C’mon, get happy.As grand escapism, An American in Paris – a Broadway adaptation of a Hollywood movie-musical – is superb, despite its attempts to introduce a little darkness to the 1951 original. Anyone who remembers the Gene Kelly/Leslie Caron film as flimsy and forgettable should, well, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on the musical map. She was first to record their music – on Wildflowers (1967), a seminal collection arranged by Joshua Rifkin, celebrated scholar of Bach, Beatles and Scott Joplin.Collins’ tastes are no less eclectic: she was exploring Brecht and Blitzstein in 1966 and, a decade later, won a Grammy nomination for “Send in the Clowns”, a trans- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard Harris's award-winning comedy about a group of seven women and one man who attend a weekly tap-dancing class in a dingy north London church hall ran for three years from 1984 in the West End, from where it went to Broadway. It subsequently became a film starring Liza Minnelli and Julie Walters, and then Harris wrote a musical version which hit the West End in 1997. Director Maria Friedman now revives the dramatic version, with choreography by Tim Jackson.Over the course of several months we get to know this disparate group as they chatter about their work, home and sex lives. We Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens as the Beast – have been keen to dismiss any psychology 1.01 readings of this Beauty and the Beast as a presentation of Stockholm syndrome, but the film’s makers, Disney, have been more than keen to trumpet it as having the first openly gay character. Of the latter, more later.So what is it? Well, foremost it’s a wonderfully lavish live action/ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Why? That's the abiding question that hangs over The Girls, the sluggish and entirely pro forma Tim Firth-Gary Barlow musical that goes where Firth's film and stage play of Calendar Girls have already led. Telling of a charitable impulse that succeeded beyond all expectations, the real-life scenario makes for heartening fare in our seemingly heartless times. But the fact remains that this latest version of the narrative brings very little that is fresh to the table, unless you're so desperate for a new British musical at any cost that its mere existence is justification enough. As Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The Other Palace’s housewarming party certainly lives up to its billing as a wild one – wet and wild, in fact, as the first three rows are sporadically doused with bathtub gin. The theatre formerly known as St James, revamped by purchaser Andrew Lloyd Webber as a breeding ground for musicals, opens with the UK premiere of an established show: Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s 2000 version of Joseph Moncure March’s initially banned narrative poem about the excesses of the vaudevillian Roaring Twenties.Curiously, Andrew Lippa provided a competing musical take on March’s tale in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eureka’s restored print of Charles Vidor’s 1944 musical Cover Girl looks and sounds astonishingly vivid, especially when watched on Blu-ray. Would that everything were so simple: despite a starry creative team, the film makes for frustrating viewing. Doubly so when you consider that this was one of Jerome Kern’s final scores, with lyrics provided by Ira Gershwin which are the film’s one constant pleasure: couplets like “Because of Axis trickery/My coffee now is chicory” are peerless, especially when delivered in brash style by a young Phil Silvers.Gene Kelly plays Danny McGuire, injured in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“I’m Death.” “And you’re on holiday?” Well, there’s really no way to disguise the preposterousness of this musical’s premise, nor to reconcile its winking humour and self-serious grand romance. Thus, Thom Southerland’s London premiere wisely diverts attention to its seductive qualities as a stylish period piece – come for the flappers, champers, saucy maids and misty Italian arches.Alberto Casella’s 1924 play, adapted into a 2011 chamber musical by Maury Yeston, Thomas Meehan and Peter Stone, is perhaps best known in another incarnation: the interminable 1998 Brad Pitt/Anthony Read more ...