musicals
emma.simmonds
Cinemagoers with an aversion to musicals need not fear, as in Pitch Perfect most of the singing is in a sane context, rather than its characters breaking into lavish routines in the street. After the fun but exhaustingly naff Rock of Ages, this comes as something of a relief. And if its chart pop mash-ups and campus antics seem squarely targeted at the teenage and twenty-something market, Pitch Perfect broadens its appeal shrewdly with some cross-generational acerbic and offbeat humour.The first thing Pitch Perfect gets right is its cast. Oscar and Tony nominated actress Anna Kendrick ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 1972 John Kander and Fred Ebb were invited by Bob Fosse to a private screening of his film version of their hit stage musical, Cabaret. The movie starred their protégée, Liza Minnelli, who at only 19 had won her first Tony in Kander and Ebb’s first show, Flora the Red Menace, and for whom they would go on to write “New York, New York”. “Liza was our girl, and we cared very deeply about her. We sat there afterwards and didn’t know what to say to these people whom we liked so much. Because we just hated it.”It’s not impossible to see why. When it eventually came in 2002, the movie adaptation Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Viva Forever! isn’t the clunker it’s been labelled. It’s also not the thin gruel of the standard West End jukebox musical. The real problem is that it can never be Mamma Mia!, the globe-conquering, ABBA-derived franchise previously devised by its producer Judy Craymer.To be fair, Craymer isn’t strictly the originator of Viva Forever! That honour falls to Spice Girls’ kingpin Simon Fuller and the combo themselves. They approached Craymer who, in turn, brought in Absolutely Fabulous writer and actor Jennifer Saunders to weave a narrative and script around the “Wannabe” gals’ back catalogue.Much Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance. But beneath its brightly painted face, its stockings, suspenders and corsets, its uniforms and bravado, Peter Nichols’ 1977 musical drama is revealed, in a production by Michael Grandage that is as sensitive as it is exuberant, to be both acerbically astute and compassionate. Well, as the leading lady, Acting Captain Terri Dennis puts it, “you can’t always judge a sausage by its foreskin”.That show-stealing role is inhabited to the hilt by Simon Russell Beale as the Read more ...
Peter Nichols
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.Our post-war National Service was spent defending our far-flung (and about to be abandoned) empire. Twelve of us were in a revue called At Your Service. In the opening Read more ...
Matt Wolf
On Broadway, Merrily We Roll Along remains forever scarred as the Stephen Sondheim musical that ground to an abrupt halt, closing after two weeks in 1981. But New York's theatrical failures often exist to be discovered anew across the Atlantic, and so it has long proven with a show whose last London incarnation (at the Donmar in 2000) led to a best musical Olivier Award and that lives again at the Menier Chocolate Factory thanks to a first-time director in long-time Sondheim leading lady Maria Friedman, alongside three of the savviest, sharpest, most resonantly moving performances in town. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If all of Loserville were as arresting and witty as its design, the West End would finally have what it hasn't offered playgoers in years: a buoyant British musical not reliant on a celebrated back catalogue or penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his various writing partners over time. As it is, the Elliot Davis/James Bourne collaboration, first seen over the summer at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, is cute and bouncy but also slightly dim; a tad of originality wouldn't go amiss in a show so busy referencing multiple sources that it sacrifices its own identity along the way. The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"All this hatred is exhausting," or so remarks Will Young's ceaselessly grimace-prone Emcee in Cabaret in a comment that encapsulates the evening as a whole. Returning to a show he directed to acclaim on the West End six years ago, the director Rufus Norris has reconsidered John Kander and Fred Ebb's song-and-dance classic with less nudity, stronger voices, and lots of stage business where its bite should be.Audiences will turn out for a show that features bigger names than were on offer on Shaftesbury Ave. in 2006, where musicals neophyte Anna Maxwell Martin played Sally Bowles opposite a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
John Wilson Orchestra’s stunning 2010 Prom celebration of Rodgers and Hammerstein was as close as those who heard it could imagine to being guests on the 20th Century Fox soundstage c. 1955... the sound, the style, the feel of how this music in these arrangements should go was “right” - every sigh, every swoon, every inflection - it couldn’t have been “righter”. John Wilson is an authority on what the great Hollywood movie arrangers and orchestrators did for the movie versions of these classic scores.The received wisdom is that Richard Rodgers - arguably the greatest popular melodist of them Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In Beatles’ lore, the Prince of Wales Theatre is totemic. Here, on 4 November 1963, the cheeky quartet played the Royal Command Performance before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. John Lennon quipped, “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery”. Now, 50 years on from the release of their first single, a tribute of sorts is taking place on the same stage with the arrival of Let It Be in the West End.Let It Be tries to hide what it is – at the end of the show, the cast members are introduced for the first time as “on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of lyricist Hal David at 91 is a sad reminder that the golden age of a uniquely American approach to songwriting is getting further and further away. The Bacharach and David brand will last, as will classic songs like “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Don’t Make Me Over”, “Magic Moments”, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head, “The Look of Love” and “Walk On By”. Yet David’s passing emphasises that although these compositions have a life of their own, they remain rooted in an era that becomes less and less tangible as the years pass.Of course, for David and his partner Burt Bacharach Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The fright wig is instantly recognisable. Even with her back turned, it’s obviously Tina Turner on stage. Except it isn’t. It’s actress Emi Wokoma playing the singer in a performance virtually guaranteed to turn her into a star. Casualty and EastEnders will soon be distant memories for Wokoma. Good for her, maybe, but she’s the best thing about the otherwise wafer-thin Soul Sister.Soul Sister could have been a game of two halves. The first on the Ike and Tina partnership, his abuse of her and their divorce; the second beginning with her 1983 comeback and solo career. Instead, the solo years Read more ...