musicals
David Nice
Judge Judy meets The Only Way Is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on TV. Which in a make-believe sense it does: we’re the audience in the studio where Court on Camera is about to air. A warm-up chappie who turns out to be the Usher (Wagnerian bass-baritone in training Martin Lamb) – on other Sundays it will be a lady – gauges our capacity to applaud and boo, and we’re off on a case of breach of promise of marriage as you never saw it before.The pleasure is doubled because in Charles Read more ...
David Nice
Vaudeville is alive and well in the silvered Lilliputian cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night’s showbiz audience, beguiled to cheering point by the shreds-and-patches routines put together by the ultimate theatrical whirlwind, Mamma Rose, that’s because everything in this London transfer from the Chichester Festival Theatre, parody included, is solid gold. Heck, I’d even have paid to hear the first trumpet in the fabulous wind-and-brass orchestra tune up.Then, of course, there’s Imelda Staunton Read more ...
Marianka Swain
From Singin’ in the Rain and Anything Goes to Hello, Dolly! and Mary Poppins, Olivier Award winner Stephen Mear has done more than any other British choreographer to usher classic musicals into the modern era. But adept as he is at razzle-dazzling ’em, there’s more to Mear, as recent excursions like City of Angels at Donmar Warehouse and Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera prove. His contribution to the lauded Gypsy revival, opening next week at the Savoy Theatre following a triumphant Chichester run, demonstrates the combination of emotional engagement and quick-witted Read more ...
David Nice
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere of Sondheim's "musical thriller": Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras, two pianos or a handful of instruments wielded by the singers, Sweeneys as musicals and as operas, the dumpy and the tall. Which type was this one? Not a vintage English National Opera production, that much seems clear.A year after this more than semi-staging's Lincoln Centre unveiling with the New York Philharmonic, the ENO Orchestra is very much centre stage, a huge Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stephen Sondheim's ever-elastic masterpiece is downsized to largely dazzling effect in its latest iteration, which has been transferred intact to a Shaftesbury Avenue pop-up after premiering last autumn within the surrounds of an actual pie-and-mash eatery called Harrington's in Tooting, south London.Granted a Soho upgrade courtesy the producer Cameron Mackintosh, Bill Buckhurst's production may not be the most nuanced Sweeney Todd you are ever likely to come across, and some may recoil from having Jeremy Secomb's singularly vengeance-prone carnivore so fully in your face. But as a contrast Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stars continue to be born from Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. Following on from the ongoing Broadway run of the show, which catapulted to name status its Tony-winning leading lady Jessie Mueller, along comes the immensely likeable West End version and – oh, Carole! – much the same looks likely to happen again here.Until this point, English actress-singer Katie Brayben was best-known for playing Princess Diana in last year's hit play King Charles III. But from this point on, and for as long as she chooses to stick with it, Brayben (pictured below) and the West End incarnation of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It’s true that there is something wildly, garishly, theatrical about Pedro Almodóvar’s films – none more so than this rampant farce – but it’s equally true that their sensibility is far removed from what the English might deem farce, and that their speed of delivery leaves not a millisecond to draw breath, let alone sing a song. So where does that leave Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the Musical? Lost in translation; twice over.The conceit is niftily established when our anti-heroine Pepa (Tamsin Greig) staggers sleepily onto Anthony Ward’s sleek duplex set and affects a series of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Woods and forests were given a fresh impetus as a psychic terrain for the cinema by Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the other sylvan spaces so ethereally or threateningly rendered in The Lord of the Rings films and, to a lesser extent, by the Mirkwood of the second Hobbit movie. All distorted black boles, labyrinths of tangled branches, knobbly roots, and conically sun-strafed clearings, they were movie woods to rival the great Gothic forest of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) and the magical Athenian wood Warner Bros. crafted at Burbank for Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Everything about this little-known and largely forgotten show suggests epic, starting with the title: multiple locations, ambitious concept, big ideas. But like so much of Jerry Herman's work - and the received wisdom on it is invariably wide of the mark - The Grand Tour is a chamber piece at heart. Adapted from the Franz Werfel play Jacobowsky and the Colonel, the show focuses on a Polish Jew, Jacobowsky, and an anti-Semitic Polish Colonel, Stjerbinsky, who are thrown together in a desperate flight across France from the fast-advancing Nazi tsunami.Their eventual bonding - brought Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of harsh words have been and will continue to be written about the new movie musical remake of Annie, the Broadway mainstay about the Depression-era tyke who exists to teach her elders a few life lessons on the way to a sun-drenched "Tomorrow" (to co-opt the title of the show's best-known song). But from where I'm sitting, a disproportionate share of the film's self-evident faults are swept away by its impossibly irresistible young star, Quvenzhané Wallis. As long as Wallis is onscreen, it's damn hard not to smile in return and save one's gripes for later. Now all of 11 years old, Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Drop-dead dames, a hard-bitten gumshoe, an ambitious writer and a sleazy movie mogul: this slick, sassy 1989 musical by Cy Coleman, David Zippel and Larry Gelbart serves up two parallel tales of Forties Tinseltown – and both of them are swell. Directing her first musical, Josie Rourke tackles this dazzling collision of noir thriller fantasy and garish Hollywood machinations with seductive brio. And her cast glide between the show’s twin dimensions with an elegance and wit worthy of stars of the classic silver screen.The set-up is ingenious. Stine (Hadley Fraser), a novelist, has been offered Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This newly-restored version of one of MGM's most hallowed musicals is making the seasonal rounds with a run at the BFI and selected cinemas around the country. Directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz in 1955, the piece drips with period charm, while its pairing of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra is still capable of generating a box office buzz 60 years later. But (I'll just whisper this) it may seem like a bit of a slog for modern audiences.It's not just the 150-minute duration that sometimes makes time feel like it's been nailed to the floorboards, or the jarring quaintness of the Damon Runyon- Read more ...