musicals
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre's new Dorfman auditorium gets off to a kick-ass start with Here Lies Love, the Off Broadway musical transplant that does for the closing months of Nicholas Hytner's tenure as artistic director what Jerry Springer the Opera did for the early days of his regime a decade or more ago. An ongoing hit at New York's Public Theatre, David Byrne's maiden foray into the often-treacherous waters of musical theatre remains an experiential triumph, its undeniable kitsch factor wedded throughout to a witty, sometimes wounding trawl through the life and disco-intensive times of none Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's tempting with this show less to write a review per se than to simply pile on the puns, but that would be to piss on - sorry, I meant do a disservice to - both the musical that is Urinetown and to the exceptionally deft UK premiere that the Broadway sleeper hit from a dozen or more years ago is currently receiving at the hands of the director Jamie Lloyd. In New York, Tony-winners Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis's wilfully self-conscious pastiche was by turns winning and wearing, in accordance with a piece that has barely begun before it starts to self-deconstruct. Lloyd, by contrast, Read more ...
David Nice
“It takes a star to parody one,” wrote theartsdesk’s Edward Seckerson, nailing the essence of this immortal spoof-fest’s last incarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Star quality was assured given the presence of Damian Humbley, peerless in Merrily We Roll Along and even the unjustly short-lived Lend Me a Tenor, who’s in this transfer. Sophie-Louise Dann, a genius of a performer who dazzled as a prima donna in that last and even stole the show as a minor lovesick aesthete in a Proms Patience, isn’t – she’s busy preparing her Barbara Castle in Made in Dagenham just down the Strand, though Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This has been a busy season for Off Broadway musicals crossing the pond to London, from Dessa Rose and Dogfight to Forbidden Broadway and See Rock City. But for simplicity of approach coupled with swiftness of emotional attack, Benjamin Scheuer's solo musical The Lion stands apart. That's not just because the Anglo-American Scheuer, 32, possesses an apparent sweetness that makes his sungthrough embrace of anger, rage, and grief - all in the service, it should be added, of forgiveness and acceptance - that much more surprising.More to the point is that the 70-minute trajectory telling of the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Another Op'nin', Another Show”. The first musical number of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate sets the scene for a group of actors and hoofers to brush up their Shakespeare, cross their fingers and hold on to their hearts, and to hope that not too much goes wrong with their show in late 1940s Baltimore. This BBC Proms performance was anything but that kind of on-the hoof creation: it was meticulously planned, ambitiously resourced, staged and choreographed, with costume changes a-plenty.The performance was given in a newly-restored critical edition of the original 1948 staged version, with the Read more ...
David Benedict
My (very) small haul of autographs collected as a schoolboy ran the gamut from Peter Pears to Linda McCartney but even back then I knew the classiest signature I bagged was that of Elaine Stritch. Years later, she was described as someone who went from being a sensation to a legend without ever being a star, but “starring” is the only word to describe her performance in the title role of the shortlived London premiere of a less than good Neil Simon play The Gingerbread Lady in 1974. Her reviews were so explosive that my friend Michael and I ignored discussion of the play and booked tickets Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Since 1982 it’s been open season on the great and the good of Broadway musicals. It was in that very year that a chap called Gerard Alessandrini created Forbidden Broadway and from the hitherto innocuous sidelines of the fringe set out to cut any and everything with ideas above its station down to size. No show, no star was off limits. It was all good clean fun (sort of) but a sense of humour among those targeted was certainly recommended. They tried in vain not to recognise themselves but eventually learned to smile through the pain.On opening night of this now familiar British incarnation Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Women everywhere may start cutting loose in their kitchens after seeing Goddess, a sweet if slight Australian film that suggests a hybrid of Mamma Mia! and Shirley Valentine. Adapted (and greatly expanded) from a solo play written and performed by co-screenwriter Joanna Weinberg, the film's terrain is sure to hit many distaff moviegoers where they live, whether or not they find themselves displaced to Tasmania with a former boyband star (in this case, Ronan Keating) as their often-absent husband. At times too peppy for its own good, the film's abiding virtue is the first leading role onscreen Read more ...
Marianka Swain
How do you solve a problem like a musical? Rodgers and Hammerstein's ambitious Carousel seems tailor-made for expansive venues like the National Theatre, where Nicholas Hytner memorably revived this show in 1992: diminutive spaces need not apply. But conventional wisdom gets a robust refutation from Morphic Graffiti's reimagining of the 1943 classic at east London's intimate Arcola, proving that, with creative thinking, small venues can pack a mighty punch. This emerging company's dynamic interpretation also goes some way toward resolving the tension between the show-stopping numbers and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite. But the film stints on precisely that aspect of the show that sends theatre audiences to their feet every night - namely, the music, which largely gets sacrificed on the altar of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The heat is on in Saigon, and 25 years after its world premiere, Cameron Mackintosh has just turned up the thermostat. Boublil and Schönberg's celebrated take on Puccini's Madam Butterfly has always been my favourite of their collaborations (though I retain an enthusiasm for the pre-revised score of Martin Guerre) and there are moments in Miss Saigon where, truth be told, they trump the Italian master of romantic melodrama at his own game.Maybe it's the ongoing proximity of America's disastrous involvement in the Vietnam war and the subsequent resonances of Iraq, but the show seems to pack Read more ...
edward.seckerson
On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler claimed supremacy in the music department. But one thing is clear: the man who brought them on and pushed them forward - the great Frank Loesser - is all over their work like a rash. It is said he wrote two of the Pajama Game songs uncredited but he could easily have written at least one other. Had Ross not died prematurely after their second consecutive smash, Damn Yankees ( Read more ...