musicals
Matt Wolf
Nostalgia for things that probably never were is an animating theme in politics these days. Much the same feeling displaced to the realm of showbiz, lends a vaguely dampening air to White Christmas, this latest stage retread of the 1954 Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye film that its beloved more for its songs, really, than for any inherent durability.The Dominion hosted a colourless iteration of this very title five years ago, with Aled Jones and Tom Chambers in the bromance-heavy central roles. The current upgrade of the material benefits from an altogether more appealing cast, headed by Danny Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Frozen is possibly the most beloved Disney movie since the studio rediscovered its mojo in the 1990s. While picking up a couple of Oscars and laying waste to box office records, it had young girls immersing themselves in favourite characters and performing the songs on a dime.A sequel to that 2013 film was inevitable. And so with the same production team, composers and stars, we’re returning to Arendelle and its two royal sisters – one with magical powers, the other some good old-fashioned gumption, who make a formidable team when they’re not immersed in sibling squabbles. But Read more ...
theartsdesk
Aladdin, Prince Edward Theatre ★★★ Disney's latest blockbuster film-turned-stage show remains airborne – justCome From Away, Phoenix Theatre ★★★★ 9/11-themed musical crosses the Atlantic, capacious heart intactDear Evan Hansen, Noël Coward Theatre ★★★★ A stirring new musical that tackles missed connections in the internet age will steal your heart. Until 2 MayEverybody's Talking About Jamie, Apollo Theatre ★★★★ Triumphant West End transfer for this big-hearted, inclusive and utterly joyful British musicalGhost Quartet, Boulevard Theatre ★★★★ Both mystical and alcoholic Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul’s Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen is an institution in the States, running on Broadway since 2016 and currently on its second year of a national tour. It also made a star of original leading man Ben Platt, now appearing in Netflix’s The Politician – and this long-awaited West End production could well do the same for the exceedingly talented 21-year-old Sam Tutty.Tutty plays the titular Evan, a 17-year-old high school senior suffering from debilitating social anxiety. His well-meaning, divorcée mother, Heidi (Rebecca Read more ...
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 ...
Marianka Swain
London’s latest new theatre opens with an appropriately otherworldly Halloween offering: American composer Dave Malloy’s teeming 2014 song cycle, which played at the Edinburgh Festival in 2016. It’s a superb piece for demonstrating the benefits of this intimate, flexible cabaret-esque space – played here in the round, with easy audience interaction and strict maintenance of the kind of atmosphere key to Malloy’s tender piece.Ghost Quartet is formally a double album, with the sensational actor-musician cast (including Zubin Varla, pictured below) introducing each ‘track’ on its four sides. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“Every now and then the country goes a little wrong”: so goes one of the many lyrics from the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins that makes this 1990 Off Broadway musical (subsequently chosen to open Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse in 1992) a piece of theatre very much for our time. Some shows need textual tweaking when they come around again but not this one. If anything, this musical's excavation of an abiding societal fury seems more pertinent than ever today.Building in resonance every time I see it (at least if done well), Assassins has now been revived in a very smart co- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Almost exactly a century after the Weimar Republic’s constitution took effect, English Touring Opera presents a show whose birth coincided with the Republic's untimely death. His third collaboration with the prolific, maverick playwright Georg Kaiser, Kurt Weill’s The Silver Lake (Der Silbersee) opened in three German cities (Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt) just 19 days after Hitler had come to power in 1933. Although it lacks much of the acid topicality and mischief that marks Weill’s partnerships with Bertolt Brecht, that did not stop the newly-empowered Nazis from swiftly closing the Read more ...
joe.muggs
When he arrived on the scene in the mid Noughties Mika – yes his name is Michael Holbrook – flew the flag for grandiose pop classicism. He had The Feeling as fellow travellers, and to an extent The Killers in their first wave of success and Muse entering their imperial phase channelled these same impulses. Now, of course the songwriting and production values of ELO, Queen, Abba, Wings, Hall & Oates are all good and noble things to aspire to. The love of studio as instrument, the ability to cram whole concertos and movies into three minute pop songs is nothing to be sniffed Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s “refugee musical” – now there’s a phrase you don’t expect to write – is a treat. Harking back to the early 20th century pogroms of Eastern Europe, it’s darkly steeped in history, conveying the sorrows of leaving behind an old world as well as the slow, painful process of integration into a new one, in this case Canada. In case that sounds too serious, it’s also a delight of performance and music, liberally – and rather often, illiberally – infused with a Jewish humour that is sardonic and survivalist by turn.It’s the work of the 2btheatre company from 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 ...
Thomas H. Green
Renée Zellweger already has strong musical cinema form, Her role as Roxie Hart in Chicago garnered her second Oscar nomination. However, playing and singing Judy Garland is a whole different ball game. The film Judy takes a late-Sixties run of London dates as the prism through which to view the Hollywood star at the end of her life, focusing on both the triumphs and the damage wrought by her celebrity rollercoaster career. The soundtrack, on the other hand, doesn't often intimate those highs and lows so much as capture her hyper-jolly, go-get-‘em film persona.Zellweger inhabits the vocal role Read more ...