West End
Marianka Swain
It’s been 15 years since Cameron Mackintosh’s stage musical version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins made its West End debut. Now, the magical nanny returns to the Prince Edward Theatre, with Zizi Strallen (who also headlined the UK tour) succeeding her sister Scarlett in the title role – all set to capitalise on the recent Emily Blunt-starring film sequel renewing our interest in the adventures of the Banks family.“I fear what’s to happen all happened before,” muses Charlie Stemp’s Bert at the start of the show. Well, yes and no. Fans of the original movie should be warned that the Disney Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It is 70 years since Willy Loman first paced a Broadway stage; 70 years since audiences were sucked into the vortex of a man trying to live America’s capitalist dream only to see his life crash and burn around him. This production, which transfers from the Young Vic, famously recasts Arthur Miller’s vision from a black man’s perspective, a powerful idea that gains heightened potency in an era in which Trump continues so shamelessly to reclaim America for the oppressed white man.Director Marianne Elliott – who so brilliantly re-energised Sondheim’s Company last year by making the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If ambition were all, Groan Ups would get an A*. Marking the first of a very welcome three-show residency at the Vaudeville Theatre, this latest from the cheerfully unstoppable Mischief Theatre tethers the japery we have come to expect from the team behind The Play That Goes Wrong – mishaps aplenty, verbal hi-jinks – with a newfound interest in the human psyche. Think of an amalgam of, say, Alan Ayckbourn mixed with Feydeau, and you get somewhere near the landscape of a terrifically likable, if overlong, study of how we got here from there. Or how they got there, that is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A hit comedy about a textile scientist? It might sound unlikely, but Ealing Studios’ 1951 sci-fi satire, starring Alec Guinness, was one of the most popular films of the year in Britain. Now, Sean Foley hopes to repeat its success with his new West End stage version, which tweaks the formula to go big, broad and occasionally Brexit-referencing – with varying results.Stephen Mangan, who also collaborated with Foley on the similarly goofy, high-energy Jeeves and Wooster: Perfect Nonsense, plays chemist Sidney Stratton, whose great invention is fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. But Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Doors and sardines. Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life.” Michael Frayn’s laugh-til-you-weep backstage comedy transfers from the Lyric Hammersmith (where it first appeared in 1982), and Jeremy Herrin’s superb revival has tightened up further for this encore run, resulting in the funniest night you’ll have in the West End.Since staging Noises Off seems to tempt fate even more than uttering “Macbeth”, the production was once again visited by misadventure – this time a minor prop mishap, rather than Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The work isn't finished on Big, if this stage musical of the beloved 1988 Tom Hanks film is ever to, um, make it big. A Broadway flop in 1996 where it was among the last shows directed by the late, much-admired Englishman Mike Ockrent, the material finds a sweetness in its West End incarnation that eluded it Stateside. But even with onetime boyband member Jay McGuiness adroitly capturing the manchild played by Hanks onscreen, the show remains awkwardly positioned between the satiric and the sentimental. And a ruthless pruning wouldn't go amiss either: by the time we'd got to the long-aborning Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A tale of teenage depression and its family resonances, Florian Zeller’s The Son has a devastating simplicity. It’s the final part of a loose trilogy, following on from the playwright’s The Father and The Mother, but the new play eschews the obliquely experimental structure of its predecessors for something much more direct. Where the earlier works explored the nature of dramatic perception itself – through the prisms of dementia and psychosis respectively – The Son concentrates its stark energy on the experience of mental illness in a story that’s partly about the consequences of divorce but Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We're saying goodbye to a much treasured friend. Fleabag will live on, of course – other actresses have and will inhabit the role – but Phoebe Waller-Bridge, its creator, has said this short run at Wyndham's Theatre is the last time she will perform the character on stage.And so that knowledge makes this deliciously filthy and witty monologue – about a twentysomething woman who attracts trouble – even more enjoyable. It was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013 and Waller-Bridge later performed it at Soho Theatre in London and, more recently, SoHo Playhouse in New York, gaining a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the glories of contemporary London theatre is its revivals of classic American drama. Year after year, audiences are able to revisit and enjoy the great landmarks of postwar American playwriting from greats such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (recently joined by the likes of Lynn Nottage). Now the latest addition to the West End's glory days is Williams's 1961 masterpiece, The Night of the Iguana, in a great production whose starry cast includes Clive Owen, Lia Williams and Breaking Bad's Anna Gunn.The story is set in 1940, on the veranda of the Costa Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Cheeky and broad and (for the most part) as entertaining as seems humanly possible, this embryonic entry from the collaborative pen of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber is back at its onetime London home, the Palladium. It's a production far surpassing any of the various London and Broadway Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoats I have come across over the last 30 years or more. For that, credit a director, Laurence Connor, busy riding the buoyancy he generated in a contemporary Lloyd Webber entry, School of Rock, alongside the canny pairing of a name star in a livewire Sheridan Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Better than the 2001 film but likely to disappoint devotees of the book, Captain Corelli's Mandolin onstage works best as a reminder of the identifiable stagecraft of its director, Melly Still. Playful, non-literal, and often endearingly physical (the human goat all but steals the show), Still's approach to this tale of love during wartime overrides a reductive and sometimes comically cliché script from Rona Munro full of lusty Italians singing Verdi and the like. As summer filler at a playhouse devoted for most of the last year to Harold Pinter, one could do a lot worse, and the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time hasn't necessarily been kind to this slow-aborning West End transfer of a show first seen (and lauded) in its 2015 debut in Leicester and then again two years later for a summer run at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 has now reached the West End, and the obvious question is who is this musical version of the ever-popular Sue Townsend books for? It's difficult to imagine overly many of the Adrian Moles of today (or even their parents) latching on to jokes about Dallas or Elizabeth Taylor, and the retrograde sexual politics – "shut your Read more ...