musicals
Helen Hawkins
It’s three typical cat-lives since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn staged TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a musical. The piece can’t quite shake the feel of being a cleverly fashioned showcase for individual performers whose component parts are not totally stitched together. But 45 years on, it can still surprise.Drew McOnie, in charge at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, is a director who can be relied upon to freshen up familiar material, as he did in his small-forces update of Nutcracker at the SBC. This isn’t a radically rethought CATS, as that production was, but its Read more ...
Graham Rickson
“Your civilisation is young but controlled by minds which are old,” says one of the alien Alphoids in Toomorrow to the four young musicians beamed aboard his spacecraft. He’s also hinting at one of the film’s problems; Toomorrow often feels like it’s been helmed by a creative team rather creakier than the young target audience, one contemporary review describing it as "a film for youngsters made by oldsters who are attempting to commercialise everything that’s dear to the teenage heart". That parts of it it resemble an extended episode of The Monkees is unsurprising, given that one of the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Social engineering gets a bad press. The whiff of creating a eugenics-inspired master race by other means clings to it, so too agitprop induced brainwashing, the Republic of Gilead also hoving into view. That’s at the level of a society, but at the personal level, it’s scarcely better received, the thought of tiny protégés being force-fed learning, violin or tennis racquet in hand, both bigger than they are.But I’m here (literally, right here, right now) because of such practices, the son of a panel beater and school dinner lady, who first went to a Russell Group university and later received Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A febrile energy powers Timothy Sheader’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, which arrives in the West End with an edgy vibe that powerfully conveys the idea of Jesus as a dangerous revolutionary. At the age of 56, the musical isn’t showing its age remotely, with its vigorous, unashamedly complex rhythms and persuasive interrogation of the Bible marking it as a resounding classic even for Lloyd Webber agnostics like this critic.You could argue that Eurovision star Sam Ryder was made for the role, a former carpenter with an impressive beard and a lion’s mane of hair, who after years of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The parade of stage musicals borne from films continues with Pride, which takes the open-hearted, small-scale 2014 movie of the same name and brings it to the stage with many of the film's creatives (director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford) along for the ride. The unbridled appeal to the emotions will be familiar to those who know Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots, two other musicals sourced in sweet indie English films that acquired a full-throttle theatrical life of their own. (Like Billy Elliot, this show, too, reserves musical pride of place for a song devoted to solidarity, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Science on stage is quite the thing at the moment with a revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen opening at Hampstead Theatre next week and Lifeline, a British musical, injected into Southwark Playhouse for a six-week residency.It’ll be interesting to track the difference between the reactions of audiences and the critics as too many journalists dismiss anything beyond a bunsen burner or a percentage calculation as a matter reserved for boffins. Being proudly ignorant of such subjects appears to be on the person spec for a job at the BBC, but the explosion of science-based podcasts and YouTube Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If heart were art, there would be no stopping The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the 2012 Rachel Joyce novel that became a film and then a stage musical, seen first at Chichester last summer before arriving on the West End. As it is, I'm afraid I stumbled at the first hurdle of plausibility. Let's just say that if I had someone important in my life dying of cancer - as in fact has happened - I would do everything I could to get there as fast as I can.That is decidedly not the route taken by Devon's own Harold Fry (Mark Addy, inheriting Jim Broadbent's screen role) who embarks upon the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Scottie Fitzgerald, the sole offspring of F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, swigs from a hip flask where she shouldn’t (she inherited the transgression gene). She’s in the room that harbours her parents’ cluttered archive, and soon she conjures their ghosts who tell us the story of their lives.Or, more accurately, some of the story of their lives, continuing a trend in biopics (Bradley Cooper’s Maestro is an example) in which we’re either assumed to know the works or to accept that the artistic achievement is less interesting than the marital strife that fuels it. Inter alia, such narratives come Read more ...