musicals
theartsdesk
Bo Burnham says he doesn’t like the terms musical comic, internet sensation or teenage wonder. Well he’s all three, save the last now, as he turned 20 during this year’s Fringe - and anyway he prefers the term prodigy, he tells us in deadpan tones typical of the deeply ironic, faux offensive manner of his performance style. But sensationally talented he undoubtedly is, and this is an hour so stuffed with gags - verbal, visual and musical - that one almost doesn’t have enough time to savour each one before yet another rolls by.Bo Burnham, Pleasance Dome *****
Burnham began doing musical skits Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Wicked is that rare Broadway musical transplant to London that has recouped its costs - and how. Part paean to female empowerment, part parable of life in Bush-era America or any land on the desperate look-out for an enemy, the show also offers spectacle a-plenty amidst a musical theatre climate increasingly defined by the Menier Chocolate Factory and its various progeny, whereby less is more (which, in fact, sometimes it is).How then is this speculation on the state of Ozian affairs prior to a certain iconic film - hint: think yellow brick roads and Toto - holding up as it enters its fifth Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have been the glossy, Labrador-like abandon of John Wilson and his fabulous orchestra, but barely two bars of the Oklahoma! overture had passed before I caught myself grinning and drifting into critical neutral. Richard Rodgers’ scores are built for a symphony orchestra, and the massed forces of over 50 strings, swollen brass and percussion sections, brought out their sweeping, sparkling best. There have been major international orchestras this season that have failed to muster half the energy and commitment Wilson drew from his players; the overtures and instrumental interludes (in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Chicago, in some ways, remains the great musical theatre surprise success of modern times. Bob Fosse's dissection of sex and violence in the Windy City had a respectable Broadway run back in the 1970s (898 performances in all), featuring a heavyweight cast, two of whose three stars (Gwen Verdon and Jerry Orbach) are, alas, no longer with us.Chicago, in some ways, remains the great musical theatre surprise success of modern times.Bob Fosse's dissection of sex and violence in the Windy City had a respectable Broadway run back in the 1970s (898 performances in all), featuring a heavyweight cast Read more ...
Veronica Lee
He may call it Titting About, but Kevin Eldon’s show, his first as a solo performer (at the grand age of 49), should be made compulsory viewing for young comics. For this is a man who has learned his craft, the value of good writing, of stage presence, of timing and myriad other things while putting together a lengthy CV that includes Nighty Night, I’m Alan Partridge, Fist of Fun and Brass Eye. If you have seen him in any of those, you will know he's a comedic actor of great range and restraint.Kevin Eldon, The Stand ****
Eldon first comes on in the guise of “most promising poet of 1988” Paul Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is a show of such originality and inventiveness that I will struggle to convey just how much fun it is to watch a man perform sight gags and physical comedy for an hour - and who does indeed appear throughout with a strip of black gaffer tape over his mouth.The Boy with Tape on His Face, Gilded Balloon ****
Although New Zealander Sam Wills doesn’t speak a word and uses clowning skills in his act, this is far removed from the kind of knockabout humour that is usually accompanied by a hooter to mark the punchline. Instead he has an incredibly expressive face to convey his thoughts, whether Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Kerry Ellis amassed a legion of adoring fans when she went "green" playing Elphaba in Stephen Schwartz's smash-hit musical both in London and on Broadway. But her pre-eminence as a musical-theatre-diva-cum-rock-chick was secured earlier still when Brian May, the celebrated lead guitarist of Queen, asked her to play Meat in the Queen/ Ben Elton show We Will Rock You. May quickly recognised a symbiosis between them and their CD single Wicked in Rock sprung a rip-roaring reimagining of "Defying Gravity" with Brian May's amazing guitar riffs a key feature.
Now her debut album Anthems from Decca Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood. Sondheim meant that in a life-and-death kind of way, but it applied literally to this ingenious show at the autumnal August preview I attended. Some folk thought Act One’s knitting-up of polyphonic fairy-tale lines really was the happy end. Others found unseasonable damp gnawing their bones and slunk off to comforting warmth. Don’t go, I pleaded, it gets deliciously darker. Yet given a production even the teensiest bit less incisive than Richard Jones’s 1990 London premiere staging, I found myself doubting both the quality of that darkness Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Celia Pacquola made her Fringe debut last year after storming various comedy festivals in her native Australia with a show about her boyfriend’s infidelity and, while it was entertaining enough, it lacked a bit of oomph. But her new show packs a real emotional and comedic punch and displays a noticeable development of her writing and performing talents.Celia Pacquola, Gilded Balloon ****
It’s again an autobiographical story and ostensibly Flying Solos is about those moments in life when we have no choice but to go it alone. To illustrate the point, Pacquola describes the task she set herself Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For most people a 25th anniversary is cause for celebration – a party, a dinner, maybe a few speeches. If you are musical theatre phenomenon Les Misérables however, festivities operate on an entirely different scale. London struggles to support two opera houses, yet this anniversary year will be playing host to three separate (and briefly simultaneous) productions of Boublil and Schönberg’s classic show, including an all-star, cast-of-thousands spectacular at the O2.Skipping over what such excess says about the tastes of London’s theatre-goers, it also says much about the show itself. An all- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You can't move in London for American performers, whether it's the Yankee contingent of The Bridge Project at the Old Vic, or the presence at various addresses of Mercedes Ruehl, Jeff Goldblum, Glee star (and erstwhile Tony nominee) Jonathan Groff, and, of course, pretty well the entire cast of Hair. But incomplete though that run-down is (one mustn't forget the silvery voiced Sierra Boggess in Love Never Dies or David Hyde Pierce's stern-faced mien in La Bête), few visitors have fired up the public as has Whoopi Goldberg, at the Palladium for three weeks to boost the musical, Sister Act, on Read more ...
theartsdesk
After making her Edinburgh debut last year, Tiffany Stevenson returns with another cracking show, Dictators. Ostensibly it’s about Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, et al, but in reality she cleverly manages to do a show about the mother-daughter relationship and our obsession with celebrity in the guise of a political theme. Mums, celebs and bastards on the same bill - it's a stroke of genius.Tiffany Stevenson, The Stand ****
Stevenson is hugely likeable and self-deprecating; before she wrote this show, she tells us, “the Cultural Revolution was a pot of yoghurt to me”. But the serious stuff is very Read more ...