Broadway
Matt Wolf
Laura Benanti has been enchanting Broadway audiences for several decades now, and London has this week been let in on the secret that recently charmed playgoers at this summer's Edinburgh Festival: the comedienne perhaps best known in some circles for her wicked impersonations of Melania Trump can hold her own in a solo show that mixes self-deprecation and determination in equal measure.The first quality is there in the show's faintly damning subtitle, Nobody Cares, which was offered up by one of Benanti's two young daughters - her children so clearly the apple of their mother's eye that you Read more ...
Robert Beale
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical from 1948, it’s all the same country. The couple whose marriage is at the centre of it all are seen in different eras of US history, and while they hardly age, the country changes vastly.It's an extraordinary piece for the Broadway of its time. Credited with being the first “concept musical”, it frames its story as a piece of vaudeville (by 1948 already a thing of the past), with a Magician whose act introduces Sam and Susan Cooper by having him suspended in the air and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its feet. But what of the other room, the writers’ room, where the ideas emerge mistily and the egos clang in conflict? [title of show] pulls back the curtain behind the curtain, behind the curtain.“More meta?” I hear you ask, a little wince in the voice. But, rather than an exercise in smartypants critiquing of cultural production from the inside-out ( Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is there a more purely likeable actress than Sheridan Smith, the performer who was still a teenager when she stole the show at the Donmar in Into the Woods and who managed, as Elle Woods in the West End premiere of Legally Blonde, to bring tears both to her eyes and ours?If so in the London theatre at the moment, I have yet to come across her, and the first thing to be said about the new Rufus Wainwright-Ivo Van Hove musical Opening Night is that it is jolly lucky to have Smith centre-stage. So engaging is this performer, so tirelessly focused and true even when the show she is fronting Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of MJ the Musical may be keeping a portrait of the King of Pop that has acquired all his scars, physical and psychological.Few of them, though, are on show in this version of the ongoing Broadway hit. The MJ we meet there is forever frozen in 1992, pony-tailed and dressed in sophisticated black and white. The first scene shows him in a rehearsal room, meticulously fine-tuning numbers for his Dangerous tour with a producer and a troupe of dancers. A young black boy whose mother can’t find a babysitter has accompanied her there. Jackson Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Sondheim gala show Old Friends is a must for fans of the master, naturally, but its quality would knock anybody who loves musical theatre for six. It’s the successor to a one-off gala of the same name staged in May 2022 and broadcast since by the BBC; a recording will soon be available. The line-up that night included Bernadette Peters, Judi Dench, Sian Phillips, Damian Lewis, Maria Friedman, Helena Bonham Carter, Haydn Gwynne, Julian Ovenden and Julia McKenzie. The last-named has lent her expertise to the current production, along with Matthew Bourne, who's in charge of the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre? And there's also Les Dennis neither dancing nor singing. Why? If you set aside such minor gripes, one can delight in a show that Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
What do you mean you haven’t heard of the newsboys’ strike of 1899? It’s a classic David and Goliath story: a group of New York kids selling newspapers for Joseph Pulitzer (him of the prize), who take a stand when their boss tries to charge them 20% extra to buy their “papes”.The 1992 Disney film, Newsies, became a cult classic, and was turned into a Tony-winning Broadway show in 2011 that ran over 1000 performances. The newsies have now burst onto the stage of the shiny Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, backflipping, wise-cracking, and making the most of some mediocre songs.Director/ Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Gabriel Byrne is not a typical film star. From his breakthrough as the lustful and doomed Uther Pendragon in Excalibur, via his iconic Prohibition-era gangster in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing and the wickedly twisty The Usual Suspects, the Irishman has evaded the usual, overexposed trappings of celebrity, remaining a familiar, respected, but largely private figure.All of which makes this one-man evocation of his childhood and early life, based on his 2020 memoir of the same name, something of a revelation: not for its scandal or behind-the- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Slamming the door on experience comes with repercussions in A Doll's House, Part 2, the thrilling Broadway entry from American writer Lucas Hnath that has arrived at the Donmar as part of an America-friendly season at that address including Marys Seacole (already finished) and The Band's Visit (still to come).In each case, the Covent Garden venue has chosen to take a fresh look at the source rather than bringing over a pre-existing version, which in this case allows for the director James Macdonald to effect his customary wizardry. This veteran of new writing is well-matched to Hnath's Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The 2001 Reese Witherspoon-starring film Legally Blonde, upon which Heather Hach, Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin’s peppy Broadway musical is based, was something of a Trojan horse: a bubblegum-pink comedy with a feminist spine.Now Lucy Moss, co-creator of the juggernaut Six, updates it further with progressive casting choices and a winning kitsch stylisation in this joyous 21st century revival. Malibu princess Elle Woods (Courtney Bowman) has it all: president of her sorority at UCLA, and on the cusp of getting engaged to her dream man, Warner Huntington III (Alistair Toovey). But Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Steven (David Ames) is having a birthday party. He’s invited his closest friends – two of whom have recently started dating their personal trainer, Steve – and his partner, of course: Stephen (Joe Aaron Reid). Their eight-year-old son, Stevie, is being babysat by his grandma. Even the handsome Argentine waiter (Nico Conde) is called Esteban.As homages to Stephen Sondheim go, Steve, a play by Mark Gerrard previously seen Off Broadway and now inaugurating the Seven Dials Playhouse, is pretty obvious.Andrew Keates’ direction and Lee Newby’s set design make great use of the theatre Read more ...