musicals
aleks.sierz
You can see why artistic director Indhu Rubasingham chose to stage this version of Zadie Smith's classic White Teeth as part of the Kiln's opening season. The bestselling 2000 debut novel is set in Willesden, Kilburn and thereabouts so it's a good fit for what is essentially a play that pays tribute to the area's multicultural character. Ironically, of course, the Kiln's previous incarnation, the Tricycle Theatre is mentioned in the book, and Canute-like protestors outside the venue continue to campaign in vain for the old name to be reinstated. But how does Stephen Sharkey's adaptation cope Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The most thrilling revivals interrogate a classic work, while revealing its fundamental soul anew. Marianne Elliott’s female-led, 21st-century take on George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical comedy Company makes a bold, inventive statement, but somehow also suggests this is how the piece was always meant to be. Ah, a weighted paradox – Company is full of them. Successful New Yorker Bobbie (Rosalie Craig, pictured below with Alex Gaumond and Jonathan Bailey) is celebrating/avoiding her 35th birthday, amidst the overbearing friends she both loves and longs to escape Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What better way to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? That is the capacious-hearted thinking behind this new musical version of Twelfth Night, which additionally marks Kwame Kwei-Armah's debut production at the helm of that undeniable dynamo otherwise known as the Young Vic. Resident of late Stateside where he was running Baltimore's Center Stage, Kwei-Armah has posited as his opening production a show that celebrates London in a giddy spirit of inclusion that seems a necessary antidote to our mean-spirited times.And if Kwei-Armah's production, credited to him and the powerhouse Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There was once a time when grime music was very angry, and very threatening, but that seems a long time ago now. Today, Dizzee Rascal is less a herald of riot and revolt, and more of a national treasure, exuding charm from every pore, even if his music has become increasing predictable and safe. But, as wordsmith and dancer Debris Stevenson proves in her debut play, Poet in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal still can change minds and influence people. Now on the Royal Court's main stage, the electrifying semi-autobiographical show features Stevenson herself, as well as grime MC Jammz and music by Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Cher. Abba. The Mamma Mia films. If you're not excited by all of the above, I'm afraid we can't be friends. I will not apologise for being thoroughly giddy at the prospect of a Cher album of Abba covers. The Queen of Camp taking on some of the greatest pop songs of all time: it's unashamedly exhilarating.Well, the idea of it was, anyway. In reality, the album is – fine. A bit like a Chinese takeaway, or the finale of Bodyguard, the anticipation has somewhat outweighed the event itself. Dancing Queen opens with its title track. What's immediately striking is that the instrumentation of Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This London premiere of Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s 2010 musical (based on Daniel Waters’ oh-so-Eighties cult classic movie, starring Christian Slater and Winona Ryder) had a development period at The Other Palace – no critics allowed – before cruising into the West End with a cult following already in place. A winning strategy, as it turns out, resulting in adoring audiences cheering on a show that’s largely worthy of their adulation.Veronica (Carrie Hope Fletcher, pictured below with Jamie Muscato) decides to strategically befriend it girls the Heathers (Sophie Isaacs and T’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Few things divide opinion as much as comedy, and we’ve all had the experience of sitting through a film stony-faced while all around collapse with mirth. What tickles you? Erudite Wildean wordplay, or the simple joys of watching a fat bloke fall over? The genius of Mel Brooks’ 1967 incarnation of The Producers is that it ticks so many boxes. There’s something to please (and offend) everyone. The set-up should by now be familiar: has-been Broadway producer teams up with naïve accountant to produce a show so terrible that it will close on opening night, allowing them to flee with the oversold Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
There's a clear theme running through this year's autumn programme at the Southwark Playhouse: new musicals with strong feminist roots. Wasted, centred on the Bronte siblings, is landing later this month, but first there's Unexpected Joy, written by Bill Russell and composed by Janet Hood, and directed by Amy Anders Corcoran. First seen Off Broadway, this is a solid, dependable sort of show that doesn't justify the first word of its title.The eponymous Joy (Janet Fullerlove) is a hippy musician straight out of the '60s, wafting about the stage in kaftans and shawls ( Read more ...
David Kettle
The Edinburgh International Festival scored quite a coup in securing the services of Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the very day of the great composer/conductor’s centenary – and for the festival’s penultimate concert of 2018. And with local legend Nicola Benedetti as violin soloist, there was an understandably expectant, almost carnival atmosphere in the packed Usher Hall. What we got, however, was a concert that was far more restrained – at times puzzlingly so – but more thoughtful, too.The most fun of the evening came in the form of four miniature Read more ...
David Nice
1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among Bernstein's works - more contestably – is MASS of 1971, surely his biggest and most resonant score, but hardly a candidate for comparable classicism. What John Wilson applied last night to make On the Town work as unremittingly well as the much shorter ballet, Fancy Free, was precisely that classical focus, high on energy and cutting no slack. Never Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In West Side Story, those great, familiar songs just keep on coming. Already by the end of the first half an hour, there have been “The Jet Song”, “Something’s Coming”, “Maria”, “Tonight” and “America”, and there is no shortage of them still to come.Saturday’s “concert version” of the show, in celebration of the Bernstein centenary was always going to be one of the big events of the Proms season. The John Wilson Orchestra have increasingly become a welcome fixture at the Proms since their debut in 2009, and a mainstay of the Saturday night programming. The decision to put on an extra show on Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a man seeking love and fortune via a bloodthirsty plant. This revelatory revival from Maria Aberg embraces the work’s B-movie dichotomy: equal parts dark, gory fable and riotous carnival of delights.Orphaned Seymour (Marc Antolin) is nerdy assistant to the Skid Row florist who took him in as a child. He pines after colleague Audrey (Jemima Rooper, Read more ...