musicals
aleks.sierz
If you like the feeling of leaving a show, surrounded by the gently glowing faces of happy fellow audience members, then this is one for you. It’s a musical evening full of joyful singing – mixing classics by Mendelssohn and Bartok with a best-of chunk of the back catalogue from the Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne – that transports you to a different world. Adapted by Billy Elliot author Lee Hall from the 1998 novel Sopranos by Alan Warner, it delights with its onstage music and raucous lust for life, and offers an exceptionally exhilarating explosion of swaggering joy and rampaging Read more ...
bella.todd
Watching Cameron Mackintosh’s joyful revision of this Sixties musical, it’s possible to believe for a moment that all the world needs now is love sweet love and a shit-ton of banjos. With a new book by Downton Abbey behemoth Julian Fellowes, new numbers by the pair behind hit musical Mary Poppins, and design that delights at every turn of the multi-revolve, Half A Sixpence seems destined to follow a flush of previous Chichester Festival musicals into the West End. It also puts vintage stars around the previously unknown name of Charlie Stemp.Charlie Stemp. Isn’t that just the best name? It’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The home-cinema release of Absolute Beginners is a rarity, as it’s one where watching the bonus before the main feature is a must. In Absolute Ambition, those involved with the film are brutally frank about this most hyped piece. It’s also an eloquent, fascinating potted history of the pop-cultural milieu that led to it being made in the then still-resonating aftermath of punk. Despite being set in the 1958 of its source book, Colin MacInnes’S Absolute Beginners, director Julian Temple avers that the film was more about when it was made than when it was set.That wasn’t clear on its release, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name. It was Nixon who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Nixon who sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I. Those top notes of Marilyn Monroe’s in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
London’s West End may be the envy of the world, but when it comes to musicals the big-hitting theatres might have to up their game a bit if they’re to keep up with the city’s rival offerings. Compare the summer’s biggest opening, Aladdin (currently failing to pull a genie out of its bottle at the Prince Edward Theatre) with just a few of the current upstart alternatives: the cheeky and charming Bugsy Malone at the Lyric Hammersmith and the thoughtful Into The Woods at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Now, from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, comes yet another challenger – a gritty new Jesus 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 ...
Marianka Swain
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley’s 1982 musical take on Carter Brown’s California-set whodunit fiction is pulp noir to the max. However, unlike the pair’s previous collaboration, the indelible Rocky Horror Show, this is more homage than send-up – arch but fairly straightforward storytelling in place of riotous, risqué pastiche.That’s problematic when Sixties sensibilities are presented to a modern audience with only the flimsiest attempts at subversion. The male gaze dominates, unashamedly, in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
For those in sore need of a theatrical pick-me-up, jazz square your way over to Bugsy Malone. Last year’s smash-hit opener of the redeveloped Lyric has been given a well-deserved encore, with Sean Holmes’s production once again nailing the beguiling blend of Alan Parker’s 1976 film: children performing musical mobster pastiche, smartly knowing in their deconstruction of adult absurdities, but sidestepping cloying precocity.There’s a ramshackle feel to this Bugsy – some garbled dialogue, accents meandering between broad New Yoik and distinct south London – that actually adds to its charm. No Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If anyone harboured any doubts as to how diverse the world of musical theatre can be, this past week will surely have proved an ear and eye-opener. While Richard Taylor and David Wood's poetic take on The Go-Between pretty much threw out the rule book on musicals, Disney's stage version of their blockbuster film Aladdin dutifully returns to the first edition, which is how a successful franchise works. As the old adage goes, "if I knew the secret I'd bottle it". Disney has – and pantomime has come early to the West End. There is room, of course, for everything, and I've been a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Opera North’s ongoing Ring isn’t taking up much of the chorus’s time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an eye-popping new staging of Sondheim’s Into The Woods. That opera companies can and should stage Sondheim is vindicated by this production: the musical values are superb, my only niggle being that James Holmes’s excellent pit players are hidden offstage. The tricksy ensemble numbers are dazzling, with every word and melodic line thrillingly clear.James Brining sets the opening Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It has taken six years – and Michael Crawford – to bring Richard Taylor and David Wood’s poetic musicalisation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between to the West End stage. And before the tired old debate begins as to what it is – opera? musical? play with music? – let it be said that what really counts for something here is the storytelling.Richard Taylor is a composer who loves the music of words almost as much as he loves music itself. He finds in them a songfulness, an expression, that is all about blurring the boundaries between speech and song. It isn’t important to him when someone sings but Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Satire, we’re solemnly instructed in Dougal Irvine’s new musical The Busker's Opera, “has to strike a fine balance of entertainment and teaching”. Well yes, but it’s also generally wise (discretion, valour, and all that) to keep the theatrical crib sheet to yourself, just in case your product doesn’t quite measure up. This latest show from the award-winning composer and lyricist of Departure Lounge and Britain’s Got Bhangra leads with its chin, and despite energy and bags of insouciant confidence, can’t quite pull off the pose.John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was a nose-thumbing attack on the Read more ...