musicals
Mert Dilek
Jamie Lloyd has the gift that keeps on giving. Hot on the heels of recent productions on Broadway and at the National Theatre, the visionary director is back in the West End with a stupendous reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s modern classic Sunset Boulevard, starring Nicole Scherzinger (of Pussycat Dolls fame) as the forgotten screen queen Norma Desmond.With book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, Webber's 1993 piece is an adaptation of Billy Wilder’s cult 1950 film, and finds itself, in this instance, subjected to a further adaptation in Lloyd’s masterful hands. Read more ...
Paul Vale
Although based on the 1958 Paul Gallico novel Mrs 'Arris Goes To Paris, this musical adaptation arrived much later. With a book by Rachel Wagstaff and music and lyrics by Richard Taylor, Flowers for Mrs Harris premiered in Sheffield in 2016, directed by then artistic director Daniel Evans and starring Clare Burt (now appearing across town in Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends) as the eponymous Ada Harris.When Evans transferred to the Chichester Festival Theatre the show was revived there in 2018, but this production marks its London premiere, a year after Lesley Manville led a film version of the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Sondheim gala show Old Friends is a must for fans of the master, naturally, but its quality would knock anybody who loves musical theatre for six. It’s the successor to a one-off gala of the same name staged in May 2022 and broadcast since by the BBC; a recording will soon be available. The line-up that night included Bernadette Peters, Judi Dench, Sian Phillips, Damian Lewis, Maria Friedman, Helena Bonham Carter, Haydn Gwynne, Julian Ovenden and Julia McKenzie. The last-named has lent her expertise to the current production, along with Matthew Bourne, who's in charge of the Read more ...
Paul Vale
It's rare that a new musical or play opens in the West End with as much positive word-of-mouth as The Little Big Things. Social media has been ablaze over the last few weeks, with critics and bloggers sneaking into previews and authoritative big names hailing a new hit long before the official press night.Fortunately much of the hype is well-founded, as this uproariously crowd-pleasing musical showcases not only a burgeoning new writing talent, but also flexes the muscles of @sohoplace as a truly accessible theatre space.In the summer of 2009, a 17-year-old Henry Fraser joined his rugger- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.The scene looks set for a conventional tale of middle-age crisis, of a “normal” middle-class kind. Diana and Dan live in a glass box they designed themselves – they met as architecture students – complete with Bulthaup-style minimal kitchen and stainless steel fridge. Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Forty years ago, the world was very different for gay men. AIDS was devastating their communities, especially in the big cities where hard-won enclaves of acceptance were being hollowed out, one sunken-eyed friend after another. Media screamed “Gay Plague” and some politicians barely suppressed their glee at the “perverts’” comeuppance. Allies were thin on the ground, the redtop press with their finger on the outing trigger never happier than when destroying lives for circulation.Into such a hostile, fearful, vicious world, Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman launched La Cage Aux Folles on Read more ...
David Kettle
The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, Traverse Theatre ★★★The Traverse Theatre’s biggest, most lavish production for the 2023 festival is bold, colourful and joyful. It’s also, however, a somewhat patchy creation. Aaron (a gangly, gormless Ali Watt) has just started working at the institution of the show’s title, but he quickly hears rumours of its former life as an opera house, and is almost immediately smitten by a mysterious opera-singing figure (Karen Fishwick, in fine voice) he encounters. Is she a ghost, or someone more earthly?Phantoms aren’t the only element in The Grand Old Read more ...
The SpongeBob Musical, QEH review - musical based on popular kids' animation sinks for lack of focus
Gary Naylor
There are many things that you are not told about being a parent, a vast landscape of details that batter you with unwelcome difference from that comfortable life of Friday night prosecco and pizza. One is a whole new palette of garish colours barging into your eyeline – fluorescent yellow, eye-bleeding orange, vomity green. As quickly as you learn about this hitherto unknown spectrum that even van Gogh might think a little too much, you forget, the brain too addled by fatigue to retain any information from those shocking sleepless years. Until you go to see The SpongeBob Musical – then they’ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A new theatre? In 2023? Now there’s a shot in the arm for the post-pandemic gloom. But there’s no business like show business – not for Mayfield Lavender anyway, who have found a corner of one of their beautiful purple fields and built an outdoor theatre for the poor, neglected souls of er… Epsom – but any investment in arts is surely welcome in these most philistine of times. Co-founded by Artistic Director Joe McNeice and Executive Director Brendan Maye, the space is still a little rough and ready at the moment and its vast stage may need a little reconfiguring unless budgets Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who says you can't go home again? As proof that you can, and to giddy and gorgeous results, along comes the current West End revival of Crazy for You, which reunites Broadway name Susan Stroman with the Gershwin-inspired title that launched this singular talent on her career ascent more than 30 years ago. I saw that production in New York, as I saw its London original with Ruthie Henshall and also the (unrelated, in creative terms) Regent's Park revival that followed, and can report without hesitation that this current iteration is very much the best of them all. Back at the show's Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
If you are going to see A Strange Loop, the new American musical trailing a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize that has arrived at the Barbican, here’s a checklist of topics to make sure you are on top of first: intersectionality, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, gospel plays, James Baldwin, the Chitlin’ Circuit, bell hooks, the back catalogue of Tyler Perry. Especially Tyler Perry.Perry is the Black American actor who has become a billionaire through film comedies featuring him as Madea, aka a middle-aged Black housewife called Mabel Simmons, and the rest of her family. He is the anti-Christ to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...