West End
Matt Wolf
No one ever said putting on a show was easy, least of all the names (a lot of them famous, quite a few not) on compulsively watchable view in The Sound of Musicals. Channel 4's reality-TV probe into the world of art, commerce, and high kicks is sure to be catnip to theatre folk the world over, even if the sight of Broadway actor-turned-Chichester "star" Christopher Fitzgerald walking his tentative way across a tightrope in his role as PT Barnum soon becomes a visual metaphor for the performer's ever-precarious chosen profession. Take a tumble and it's not that simple to get back up, and even Read more ...
David Goodale
“She paused and heaved a sigh of relief that seemed to come straight from the cami-knickers.” Recounted our brother Andy, many years ago……. "A silence ensued." This was not his own observation, but a quote from P.G. Wodehouse, whom neither Bobby nor I had ever read. “I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl.” He continued. “A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits.” We were hooked.As an actor, Bobby, Andy’s twin brother, was looking at the possibility of adapting a Read more ...
Peter Michael Marino
If this native New Yorker were in a relationship with the city of London, our Facebook status would read: “It’s complicated.” We’ve been through hell together. London is one of my favourite cities. I blissfully cross the pond several times a year to teach and to see my mates. But, this fabulous city also bestowed on me the worst reviews I’ve ever gotten in my life. So, why the heck am I coming back to do yet a show about the very show that shattered my dreams? Insane!In 2007, I conceived and wrote the musical version of the Madonna movie Desperately Seeking Susan - which featured the hit Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In recent years theatre has sought assistance from a pair of popular art forms. Shows based either on movies, or on pop groups’ back catalogues, have become mainstays of the theatrical economy. So the latest musical to open in the West End has the whiff of boardroom cynicism. What happens when you randomly select a famous film and an iconic songbook, yoke them together and shove them out in front of the footlights? You get Desperately Seeking Susan, a 1985 film which starred a chubby-cheeked Madonna (pictured below), but featuring the greatest hits of Blondie.In fact the idea has the Read more ...
David Benedict
Without wishing to get all Kirstie and Phil about this, theatre, more often than you’d imagine, is about location, location, location. One of the reasons why the National Theatre’s knockout The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was so potent was because director Marianne Elliott welded the audience to all four sides of the action. Transferred to a West End stage, the tension between stage and audience is undeniably different. Is the show still a triumph? Oh yes.A murder mystery with added maths – and a huge emotional kick in the telling – this is a stage version of Mark Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaking records along the way. Chicago, which opened in the same season, failed to seize the city's imagination in the same way, and had to wait till the 1990s to find an audience prepared to devour it. At the Tony Awards the musical about the foot soldiers of showbiz, the faceless dancers high-kicking in line, went on to win nine gongs, and then picked up a Pulitzer Prize. A Chorus Line soon transferred to the Read more ...
Peter Nichols
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.Our post-war National Service was spent defending our far-flung (and about to be abandoned) empire. Twelve of us were in a revue called At Your Service. In the opening Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Something new is happening in the West End. Just up the road from Thriller and down a bit from Les Misérables a billboard the colour of weak tea (positively consumptive compared to the full-colour, neon assaults on either side) proclaims the arrival of Richard III and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is back on Shaftesbury Avenue, and this time he means business – big, commercial business. How has this sleight of hand been achieved? Five words: Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry.With national fervour still fresh and raw in this Olympic year, and audiences still coming down from the high of Branagh’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown (and, just occasionally, the hollow laugh) has however emerged in the form of Roger Rees’s What You Will – a brisk hour-and-a-half’s trot through Shakespeare’s greatest hits, with a little autobiography and a lot of accents thrown in.A veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Rees can spin an anecdote with style, has plenty to tell, and the elegant shamelessness to steal them when they are not his own. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Being in a comedy double act is like being in a marriage. Except, as half of a humorous twosome once told me, with less sex. There are ups and downs and the chances of splitting are high. The push-pull tensions of the double act are explored in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, first seen on Broadway in 1972, then famously on film in 1975 with Walter Matthau and George Burns. Thirty years on from its premiere, is the magic still there?Well, the star casting certainly is. Danny DeVito, making his West End debut, has the dominant role as cantankerous clown Willie Clark, while Richard Griffiths is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
David Cameron could hardly wish for a more apt musical to pep up the people’s spirits than Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, with its wheedling entreaties about the advantages of being caught in the rain, or putting on your best front, and all. Matthew White’s staging of Top Hat - said to be the first-ever theatrical version of the immortal 1935 Astaire and Rogers movie - is finely timed for a grim (and rainy) summer, with a smart and spirited production that pretty much puts the film on stage, making the best of what look like austerity budgets. If you manage to quell the thought that a Fred 'n' Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We’ve seen a few American film and TV actresses grace the West End stage with surprising potency, but no one surely will surpass Laurie Metcalf for profound emotional truth-telling in Eugene O’Neill’s shattering family drama, given an unbeatably cast new production in London’s West End. Metcalf's by no means famous over here now, so long after her brilliant stint in Roseanne Barr's Nineties sitcom, but this is one of those performances you won't forget, up there in the Vanessa Redgrave class.The play, set exactly a century ago, famously portrays O’Neill’s own family, so much so that he would Read more ...