Menier Chocolate Factory
The Grönholm Method, Menier Chocolate Factory - sleek and short but in no way deepFriday, 25 May 2018
Add Catalan writer Jordi Galcerán to the shortlist of European playwrights who are finding an international perch, in this case with a tricksy four-character play that has had more than 200 productions in over 60 countries. The UK premiere of... Read more... |
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Menier Chocolate Factory review - brilliantly performed and imaginatively stagedWednesday, 21 March 2018
No, this isn't the large-scale Kander and Ebb musical, which opened in 1992 in London before transferring for a sizeable run on Broadway. Laurie Sansom's expert production instead both revisits and revises the lesser-known source of that song-and-... Read more... |
Barnum, Menier Chocolate Factory review - a big, blowsy spectacleWednesday, 06 December 2017
You have to hand it to Menier Chocolate Factory, a venue that doesn't let size matter as it stages an all-singing, all-dancing new production of Barnum, a musical about Phineas Taylor (PT) Barnum – the 19th-century showman famed for staging “The... Read more... |
The Lie, Menier Chocolate Factory review - fake news, real feelingMonday, 09 October 2017
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm... Read more... |
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, Menier Chocolate Factory review – more than feel-good summer funFriday, 28 July 2017
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read... Read more... |
Lettice and Lovage, Menier Chocolate Factory review - Peter Shaffer's star vehicle sagsFriday, 19 May 2017
You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on... Read more... |
Love in Idleness, Menier Chocolate FactoryTuesday, 21 March 2017
What's in a name? Terence Rattigan’s Love in Idleness is a reworking of his 1944 play Less Than Kind (never staged at the time, it was first produced just six years ago). It reached the London stage at the very end of the same year with the Lunts,... Read more... |
She Loves Me, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 08 December 2016
There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the... Read more... |
Travesties, Menier Chocolate FactoryWednesday, 05 October 2016
Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which... Read more... |
Into the Woods, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 14 July 2016
"Children will listen," or so goes a lyric to one of the most heart-rending numbers in Into the Woods, the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical that seems rarely to be long-absent from the British stage. And the great virtue of the Fiasco Theatre's... Read more... |
The Truth, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 17 March 2016
Infidelity, hypocrisy, disillusionment, betrayal – and yet this is by far the lightest of French playwright Florian Zeller’s current London hat trick. Premiering in 2011, and thus sandwiched chronologically between the bleak pair of The Mother (2010... Read more... |
Funny Girl, Menier Chocolate FactoryThursday, 03 December 2015
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales... Read more... |
