Theatre
Marianka Swain
Surely there’s never been a more apt time for Sondheim’s great cry of defiance? “I’m Still Here” is sung by showgirl-turned-actress Carlotta in Follies (1971) – added during the Boston try-out in place of “Can That Boy Foxtrot”. Loosely inspired by Joan Crawford, it’s the ultimate anthem of showbiz survival.Carlotta looks back on a tumultuous career: “Plush velvet sometimes/Sometimes just pretzels and beer”. Musically, it’s a Harold Arlen pastiche, as Sondheim explains in Finishing the Hat, since Carlotta “would see her life as a flamboyant, torchy ballad”. Lyrically, it’s pure Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Here's an irony worthy of the work of Stephen Sondheim, an artist who clearly knows a thing or two about the multiple manifestations of that word. On the same day that he turns 90, namely today, Broadway is unable to host the keenly awaited American premiere, scheduled for this evening, of the gender-flipped Company that stunned London last year. The city's theatres there (as everywhere else) shuttered by the coronavirus, New York will have to bide its time until audiences can see the director Marianne Elliott's fresh take on the story of a Manhattan singleton, once male and now female, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you want to pinpoint the genius of Robert Lepage’s multi-faceted seven-hour epic, that has returned to the National Theatre 26 years after it first dazzled British audiences in 1994, you might as well begin with a stethoscope. The stethoscope is being carried by a white-coat-clad doctor around a café in Amsterdam, in which a bohemian cluster of cultural tourists, drug seekers, adulterers and passers-by are engaged in muttered conversation. We cannot hear exactly what they are saying until the doctor approaches each individual table, holding the stethoscope out so that it acts as a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The Beatles lyric that gives Mike Bartlett’s terrific play its title dates to 1967, which also happens to be the year in which the first of Bartlett’s three acts is set. What follows are two further scenes in the evolving relationship between Kenneth (Nicholas Burns) and Sandra (Rachael Stirling), set in 1990 and then 2011. By that point, their marriage has ended, only for the onetime Oxford University sweethearts to exist under siege from their two children, not least a 37-year-old daughter (Isabella Laughland) who courses with disappointment on every front (romantic, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some wondrous acting is sacrificed on the altar of an increasingly wonky plot in On Blueberry Hill, the first play in 10 years from Sebastian Barry, the Irish playwright and novelist whose onetime Royal Court entry The Steward of Christendom showcased a treasured theatrical memory in the leading performance of the late and truly great Donal McCann.This latest work, a two-hander premiered in 2017 by Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company, isn’t remotely the equal of its 1995 forbear. And yet it, too, offers major acting opportunities for both David Ganly and Niall Buggy, the Irish actors here Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Jennifer Saunders is a one-woman tickle machine. As her countless appearances in television shows such as French and Saunders and Ab Fab prove, this triple BAFTA winner is box office magic. The mere incantation of her name is enough to sell out any West End show. So there is something really fitting about casting her as the spiritual medium Madame Arcati in this revival of Noël Coward's 1941 mega-hit, Blithe Spirit, which comes to London from the Theatre Royal Bath, where it opened last summer, in a production directed by the ever-reliable Richard Eyre.The plot concerns Home Counties novelist Read more ...
Fergus Morgan
If there’s one certainty about the Edinburgh Lyceum’s production of Mrs Puntila And Her Man Matti – and there aren't many in this unsatisfying, overlong revival – it’s that Elaine C Smith makes a terrific drunkard. The Scottish sitcom star, musical veteran and pantomime stalwart plays the erratic millionaire Mrs Puntila in Denise Mina’s re-gendered and relocated take on Brecht's 1948 original, hiring and firing staff with abandon as she totters and teeters, slurs and stumbles around the stage, sinking tumbler after tumbler of whisky. It’s an OTT, unsubtle performance, certainly, but her Read more ...
aleks.sierz
On my way to see this show, I see an urban fox. Before I can take a photo, it scrambles away. And I'm sure that, as it goes, it winks at me. This weird moment is a great prologue to EV Crowe's new play, virtually a monologue starring Katherine Parkinson, which is weird, and then some. And then some more. Although it is very short, at just over an hour long, it is a powerful account of female middle-class anxieties in Britain today. A classic Royal Court play, it is directed by this venue's artistic director Vicky Featherstone.The story, such as it is, starts with Viv, a typical middle-class Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may seem strange to watch a play about four English people on a kibbutz in the Seventies, and find yourself thinking about Brexit, but that’s precisely what springs to mind here. Culturally blinkered and politically ignorant, most of the characters seem to see their first trip to Israel as little more than an opportunity for sex and better weather. The Finborough Theatre has a fantastic record in digging out overlooked theatrical gems – not least last month’s On McQuillan’s Hill which played to packed houses. Not Quite Jerusalem was a huge hit for playwright Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s concept on top of concept in this revival of Jason Robert Brown’s beloved 2001 musical, which charts the ebb and flow of a relationship by juggling timelines: aspiring actress Cathy’s story is told in reverse chronological order, while aspiring writer Jamie’s moves forward. It’s an apt framing for a couple who are never on the same page, their dual ambitions and relative success wrenching them apart. Director Jonathan O’Boyle now adds another layer: this is an actor-musician production, with both performers playing the piano throughout, among other instruments.There are crystalline Read more ...
David Nice
Vendetta, morte: what a lark to find those tools of 19th century Italian opera taken back to their mother tongue in a Milanese take on Jacobean so-called tragedy, where the overriding obsession is on mortalità. It would take a composer of savage wit like Gerald Barry to set Middleton's satirical bloody-mindedness to music today. With Declan Donnellan directing, though, La tragedia del vendicatore remains too prosaic and half-literal a play. The attribute that's missing from the Italian lexicon here is bravura.The snazzy Dances of Death towards the beginning and at the end (pictured below Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Since 2000, Esther Baker's Synergy Theatre Project has worked with prisoners, ex-offenders and young people at risk of offending to produce powerful dramas about some of the most fraught social situations you can imagine. The latest show, written by playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak and researched in collaboration with Prisoners Abroad, is a verbatim piece about the subject of transatlantic deportation. In the current climate of Brexit trade talks, can this show – an ideal fit for this venue – cast any light on the much-vaunted special relationship between the UK and the USA?In the American Read more ...