musicals
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 ...
Matt Wolf
If it's possible to have somewhat too much of a good thing, that would seem to be the case with the British premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory of Spamilton. The latest in the indefatigable catalogue of New York songwriter-satirist Gerard Alessandrini's skewering of the Broadway scene, Spamilton is unusual in focusing its title on a single entry, Hamilton, in all its manifestations, here including Tony-winner Daveed Diggs's hair. Oh, and his racial-ethnic background. Whether that degree of detail will mean much to a local audience, however Hamilton-savvy, makes one wonder Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Mamma Mia! has a habit of bursting upon us at crucially restorative moments. The Broadway production opened just after 9/11 and provided necessary balm to a city in shock. Now comes the celluloid prequel of sorts and, lo and behold, what could have been merely a crassly commercial exercise has exactly the right innocence and heart to act as a giddy summer corrective to our coarsened times. One doesn't want to overstate the case for material that ain't deep, but all involved deserve credit for sustaining a buoyancy right through to the genuinely touching finish. And for adding Cher to this Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Shall we dodge? (One, two, three) No, the brilliance of Bartlett Sher’s Tony-winning Lincoln Center revival – first on Broadway in 2015, now gracing the West End, with its original leads – is that it faces the problematic elements of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1951 musical head on. But, in a canny reading, it finds such nuance in the piece that it feels freshly minted – if gorgeously attired in Golden Age trappings.Based on the memoirs of army widow Anna Leonowens (Kelli O’Hara), the show follows her journey to Siam in 1862, where she’s employed to teach the many children (by many wives) Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It seems only too fitting that David Lan’s luminous reign at the Young Vic should draw to a close with this bold, creatively thrilling international import. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Tony-winning musical, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2013, is an exquisite adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir – a heartfelt detective story that traipses through memory in order to decode our loved ones, and ourselves.We meet Alison at three different ages: as a child in small-town Pennsylvania, where her father runs the funeral – or “fun” – home; as a college student coming out as a Read more ...
David Nice
First palpable hit of the evening: a full orchestra in the pit under hyper-alert Opera North stalwart James Holmes, saxophones deliciously rampant. Second hit: they've got the miking of the voices right (very rare in West End shows). Third: the first ensemble number, "Another opening, another show", sends spirits soaring. What follows is very good, sometimes excellent, occasionally fresh and startling.Any sense of slight anticlimax may well the fault of a musical which, while stocked higher with hit songs than most (Cole Porter at his wickedly rhyming, melodically snaking best), has always Read more ...