Menier Chocolate Factory
aleks.sierz
We do love our spy stories, don't we? The idea of betrayal, both political and personal, seems to be a strong part of our national identity. And so is telling stories based on real events. Playwright Hugh Whitemore, who died in July, based his Pack of Lies on the Portland spy ring, a secret Soviet operation which was active from the late 1950s until 1961. This new production at Menier Chocolate Factory is the first London revival since it premiered at the West End's Lyric Theatre in 1983, starring husband and wife team Judi Dench and Michael Williams, for which Dench got an Olivier Award. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to have somewhat too much of a good thing, that would seem to be the case with the British premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory of Spamilton. The latest in the indefatigable catalogue of New York songwriter-satirist Gerard Alessandrini's skewering of the Broadway scene, Spamilton is unusual in focusing its title on a single entry, Hamilton, in all its manifestations, here including Tony-winner Daveed Diggs's hair. Oh, and his racial-ethnic background. Whether that degree of detail will mean much to a local audience, however Hamilton-savvy, makes one wonder Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Add Catalan writer Jordi Galcerán to the shortlist of European playwrights who are finding an international perch, in this case with a tricksy four-character play that has had more than 200 productions in over 60 countries. The UK premiere of The Grönholm Method follows six years on from a Los Angeles staging that boasted the same director (Mike Nichols protégé BT McNicholl) and leading man (Jonathan Cake as the bilious Frank), while a 2007 Spanish movie, The Method, expanded the premise for the screen. Given all this activity and attention, it's moderately surprising Read more ...
Matt Wolf
No, this isn't the large-scale Kander and Ebb musical, which opened in 1992 in London before transferring for a sizeable run on Broadway. Laurie Sansom's expert production instead both revisits and revises the lesser-known source of that song-and-dance adaptation: an intimate two-hander (with a prison guard thrown in for good measure) between a gay window-dresser and an ardent revolutionary who find themselves sharing a prison cell in 1975 Argentina. William Hurt won an Oscar for the showier of the two roles, but the Menier Chocolate Factory revival boasts two ideal interpreters in Samuel Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You have to hand it to Menier Chocolate Factory, a venue that doesn't let size matter as it stages an all-singing, all-dancing new production of Barnum, a musical about Phineas Taylor (PT) Barnum – the 19th-century showman famed for staging “The Greatest Show on Earth”. Director Gordon Greenberg stages a big, blowsy spectacle in this small theatre, in the round, and its cast of 18 pack a real punch.Barnum (music by Cy Coleman, book by Mark Bramble, lyrics by Michael Stewart), was a hit on Broadway in 1980 and ran for more than 850 performances, before coming to the London Palladium in 1981, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm, the seemingly conventional domestic set-up teasingly deconstructed as Zeller challenges our conception of honesty and morality.This latest Lindsay Posner-directed import is similarly light-hearted – compared with the weightier Zeller double of The Mother and The Father – and once again features two affluent couples, with the same names, plus Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s middle England, teenagers got by somehow. Without recourse to wands or Ballardian games of extinction, we survived adolescence with the help of a story full of people we knew. People (a bit) like us. Every year I re-read Sue Townsend’s chronicles of Adrian Mole, hopeless lovestruck bard of Leicester. And each year he grew up with me, as experience uncovered the texture of Mole’s life. "Phoned Auntie Susan but she is on duty in Holloway." A line like that was simply information at first. A year or two later, it brought a smile, then a conspiratorial laugh.Laughter Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on both sides of the Atlantic by Judi Dench. And here Kendal is at that ongoing West End incubator, the Menier Chocolate Factory, reviving the 1987 play, Lettice and Lovage, that the late Peter Shaffer wrote as an extravagant bouquet for his beloved Maggie Smith. The flowers on this occasion, alas, are starting to wilt. The problem partly rests Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
What's in a name? Terence Rattigan’s Love in Idleness is a reworking of his 1944 play Less Than Kind (never staged at the time, it was first produced just six years ago). It reached the London stage at the very end of the same year with the Lunts, the premier theatre couple of their time, in the leads. Inter-generational – and inter-family – dispute about the shape of post-war Britain is at its heart, and Rattigan revised the role of his arch-capitalist, War Cabinet minister protagonist to make it more sympathetic for Alfred Lunt.With its story of a son returning to his mother to find another Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the same 1963 show that swept New York last season. What one gets instead is the most deeply felt, penetratingly acted version of the piece imaginable. Following the press night curtain call, the show's 92-year-old lyricist, a spry Sheldon Harnick, took to the stage to pronounce this production the best She Loves Me he had seen. Surely he of all people Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, Dada godfather Tristan Tzara and communist revolutionary Lenin into a story which resembles a riotous party, where Wildean pastiche, political history, debate about art, unreliable memory and song-and-dance routines stay up half the night, and howl gloriously at the moon. This revival stars the ubiquitous Tom Hollander, taking a break from Rev and making up for being cruelly miscast in The Night Manager, and is directed by playwright Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Children will listen," or so goes a lyric to one of the most heart-rending numbers in Into the Woods, the Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical that seems rarely to be long-absent from the British stage. And the great virtue of the Fiasco Theatre's approach to this of all Sondheim shows is that the company's childlike sense of play releases the abiding seriousness, even sorrow, of the piece afresh. You may chafe near the outset at some of the more cutesy theatrics, including two men en travesti (better done by the British in any case) and folded bits of paper to indicate flocks of birds Read more ...