musicals
Marianka Swain
It trashed Olivia Newton-John’s film career, halted the movie-musical revival, and was so critically reviled it led to the creation of the Razzies. How, then, could the stage version of hubristic 1980 flop Xanadu become a 2007 Broadway hit? The answer, as illustrated by Paul Warwick Griffin’s sublimely silly Southwark Playhouse production, is to laugh at itself first.Adaptor Douglas Carter Beane retains the best of the original – John Farrar and ELO leader Jeff Lynne’s infectious pop/rock score – and lovingly spoofs the rest. The book’s absurd Ancient Greece/contemporary California mash-up Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Rents are going up, local businesses priced out, and the rich folk and hipsters are invading. That’s in Washington Heights, New York’s largely Dominican-American quarter, but it could as easily describe King’s Cross, one of multiple London areas undergoing gentrification. This Tony Award-winning musical from pioneering composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (currently ruling Broadway with Hamilton), which features an irresistible hip-hop, rap, pop and Latin fusion score, is propulsive entertainment with a resonant social conscience.Our guide to the Heights is Usnavi (Sam Mackay), whose bodega – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Kinks have turned 50 last and nagging talk of a reunion is still in the ether. In the absence of the real thing, there is a double-disc greatest hits album surfing the wave of latter-day Kinksmania. Meanwhile a kind of Kinks reunion stormed the West End in the shape of Sunny Afternoon, written by playwright Joe Penhall from an original story by Ray Davies.Taking the band’s glorious songbook as its soundtrack, the musical follows the Kinks from their first number one “You Really Got Me” through to the end of the 1960s when they were allowed back into America after a four-year ban caused by Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If nothing else, Stephen Sondheim’s best-known work will put you off pies; it will put you off barbers; and it may in the end put you off Sondheim. Popular though it seems to be with planners and programmers, it’s sluggish and heavy going as drama and thin gruel as music: three hours of clever musical patter, repetitive orchestral mechanisms, and slinky variations on the “Dies irae”. When you’ve seen one throat-slitting, one human pie-bake, you’ve seen them all. And when you’ve heard the Ballad at the start of Act 1 and the waltz at the end of it (“A little priest”), you’ve heard most of what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a verbatim musical with the addition of Adam Cork’s deftly knitted score. The stage version travelled to the big screen with Rufus Norris directing, and now makes it to the small screen.Television, in the shape of BBC drama Five Daughters (2010), is where the story of the murder victims was first told. London Road has widescreen moments, particularly at Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If the shoe fits, they say, wear it. But in truth there's always been a bit of a size differential between Kinky Boots, the modest urban Brit-flick set in a struggling shoe factory, and the Cyndi Lauper/Harvey Fierstein musical that it spawned, first on Broadway and now here. Lauper's score resides principally in the funk and spunk of cross-dressing catwalk glamour while the somewhat dowdy spirit of Northamptonshire - the vernacular of the piece - is barely hinted at in the "Price & Son Theme" of the opening number.But at least the show has, in one sense, "come home" and is no longer lost Read more ...
Richard Bratby
At the beginning of Act Two of John Savournin’s production of HMS Pinafore, the quarterdeck is in darkness. Kevin Greenlaw’s Captain Corcoran steps out of his cabin, downs a brandy stiffener, and launches into his melancholy lament to the moon. Woodwinds echo the ends of sighing phrases as the strings pluck their accompaniment: something about this sounds familiar. And as cymbals clash melodramatically and David Steadman, conducting, underlines the ominous chromatic rise and fall of the bass line in Little Buttercup’s fateful duet with the Captain, the target of Sullivan’s musical satire Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Never in a million years would you guess that Grand Hotel – the 1989 New York hit now brilliantly revived at Southwark Playhouse – is one of Broadway's great rescue jobs. That something seemingly so organic, so cohesive, so intricate could have reached the final stages of production in such trouble that even a force of nature like Tony-winner Maury Yeston (Nine) must have wondered it if were salvageable simply beggars belief. George Forrest and Robert Wright were, of course, famous for recycling other people's music and making hit songs out of hit tunes, but the changes that Yeston made Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Satire may famously be what on Broadway closes Saturday night, but last night's concert performance of the Gershwin brothers' Of Thee I Sing found many patrons fleeing the Festival Hall at the interval. The culprit lay in sound issues that took the aural equivalent of a pneumatic drill to a featherweight piece that needs tender treatment if it is to flourish as the original did against the odds. Rarely performed today (New York did a concert version of its own in 2006), this was in fact the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize.Last night's concert staging improved marginally Read more ...
David Nice
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptation of Grange Park Opera’s summer crowd-pleaser it sent the voices ricocheting around the Albert Hall, making mush of the words and stridency of the few belt-it-out moments. It also made it hard to assess what seemed like a resourceful staging of a baggy-monster musical with four or five great songs, no masterpiece of musical theatre (unlike My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof’s near-contemporary).The idea of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Burt Bacharach, existentialist? That's among the surprising thoughts prompted by the searchingly titled What's It All About?, the altogether delightful but also touching musical revue that trawls Bacharach's back catalogue – and that on opening night found the 87-year-old tunesmith tinkling the ivories for a moment or two during the curtain call.First seen Off Broadway 18 months ago, director Steven Hoggett's jukebox musical-with-a-twist proves even more winning on a second viewiing. The material may well be a bit too sincere – that's to say, in-your-face earnest – for more Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the rules.But Aemonn O’Dwyer and Rob Gilbert break most of them in their new musical, The House of Mirrors & Hearts. Forget exotic settings: this type of family terrace house can be found by the thousand off the Kingsland Road. And forget happy families: this one’s falling apart. What’s more, the climax of the first act is a grisly accident involving a character we haven’t even met. And two of the key Read more ...