Theatre
edward.seckerson
Even singular sensations grow older - yet A Chorus Line, which coined the phrase, seems ageless, so sure is it of its place in musical theatre history, so locked now into our theatrical consciousness. It is, no question, a wonderful show whose fabric of book (James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante), music (Marvin Hamlisch) and lyrics (Edward Kleban) is seamless and, more importantly, whose vision - as originated by choreographer/director Michael Bennett - has achieved a kind of immortality.Bob Avian, who assisted on the original staging back in 1975, is now the show's guardian and watching this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. At the Tony Awards the musical about the foot soldiers of showbiz, the faceless dancers high-kicking in line, went on to win nine gongs, and then picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line soon transferred to the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“Work, more work and six foot of earth in the end. That’s life,” says John Rutherford. That single-minded work ethic is what drives him on and drives his family to despair and desertion. As head of the century-old family glassworks business going through hard times (the banks won’t lend money), he bullies his way out of a changing world that threatens his control (“I’ve a right to be obeyed”). But he has a messianic mission to preserve a dynastic destiny at all costs.Githa Sowerby’s 101-year-old play seems an unlikely choice to bring Sir Jonathan Miller out of directorial “retirement” and to Read more ...
David Nice
I laughed quite a bit going round the exhibition to which the Barbican’s latest theatre events are tied, The Bride and the Bachelors. Pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 “Readymade” Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy? is funny in itself: a metal birdcage containing marble sugarcubes with a cuttle bone and a thermometer stuck through the bars. It’s even funnier when you learn that admirer Robert Rauschenberg, about to pinch a couple of cubes on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the late 1950s, was told by the guard, “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch that crap?” I laughed a lot, too, Read more ...
David Nice
It's odd that Jerry Herman merits only a passing mention in Stephen Sondheim's two-volume autobiographical take on Broadway words and music, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. In a couple of subjects Herman chose no less daringly than the master. Yet while La Cage aux Folles is now so entrenched that we forget its original boldness in asserting a loving gay relationship, Dear World's eccentric mix of eco-plea and nostalgia has yet to be established as a bittersweet chamber piece.Where it only took Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along 11 years to progress from flop to classic, Dear Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Noël Coward's 1924 play must have been thought very daring at the time, dealing as it does with a young man's cocaine addiction - no wonder it has been called the jazz age's Shopping and Fucking. But young composer Nicky Lancaster's penchant for nose candy wasn't the social transgression being examined - his real addiction is not drugs, but men. Quite how the then 24-year-old Coward (who created the role of Nicky on stage) got the play past the Lord Chamberlain in anybody's guess, but thankfully he did, and its themes still resonate today.At the play's heart is Nicky's relationship with his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You don’t so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada’s most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It’s hard to think of another director whose response to the Iraq War would involve an Elvis impersonator, menopause as a major plot point and a visual cadenza for twelve perspex chairs, but that’s the love/hate thrill of Lepage. Spades is the first in a planned tetralogy of plays each themed around one of the suits of cards. Conceived in partnership with round arts venues across the world, the cycle proposes a 360 degree theatrical experience Read more ...
Laura Silverman
In a draining first work, Ailís Ní Ríain infuses a coming-of-age saga with Irish folklore. The outline sounds gripping enough: burdened with caring for their ill parents, two teenage friends run away to the Irish coast. But then come cultural threads that weave uncomfortably into the canvas, plus surreal overtones that suggest the story is not so straightforward. On their journey, the two girls meet a loopy farmer, a loopy lorry driver and a loopy butcher, who tell them a fairytale about a lazy girl who would prefer not to spend all day behind a spinning wheel.The story is "The Lazy Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When's the last time you encountered a play with a hissable anti-hero and a young heroine who radiates charity, decency, and all things good? Those polarities are on full-throttle view in The Stepmother, the all-but-unknown Githa Sowerby play from 1924 that makes up in its vigorous appeal to the jugular what it may lack in dimension and subtlety (Chekhov this ain't.) And if the opening night is any gauge, Sowerby's tale of a young wife and her unctuous, much older rapscallion of a husband has a demonstrable capacity for evoking responses from the crowd. Panto season aside, I haven't Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s nothing novel about novel-adaptations on stage. We’ve seen every classic from Pride and Prejudice to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woman in White (and The Woman in Black) get the full theatrical treatment, and I’m not sure any have ended up the better for it. The power of a tale is in the telling, and unmoored from the delicate narrative handling of an Austen or a Dickens things can go horribly awry. And so it is with the West End’s latest – a touring production of Dickens’ Great Expectations that has stumbled mistakenly onto The Strand and is doing its best to brazen it out.Jo Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last weekend it was the 50th anniversary of an important event in postwar Welsh history. In early February 1963 the Welsh Language Society – Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg – protested for the first time about the right of Welsh speakers to live their lives in Welsh. At Pont Trefechan in Aberystwyth 500 people gathered on Saturday to mark the event and the same number came back on Sunday to Y Bont (The Bridge), a commemorative outdoor play devised by the Welsh-language National Theatre, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru.The ball has been energetically pushed up the hill ever since, but some things don’t Read more ...
Heather Neill
A little man takes on Authority and fails. A little man dons a colourful uniform, complete with boots and spiked helmet, and he becomes Authority. Carl Zuckmayer wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power.Wilhelm Voigt, the real-life subject of the drama, had his moment of fame as the ersatz Captain of Grenadier Reserves in 1906. An anti-militarist aware of the growing Nazi threat and declared “half Jewish” because one of his grandfathers was Jewish, Zuckmayer was clearly writing about his own time as much as the early 1900s. He described his satire – in Read more ...