musicals
Matt Wolf
The seemingly eternal British love affair with Guys and Dolls continues apace with the (somewhat recast) transfer to London of the Chichester production from two summers ago, and a more buoyant way to inaugurate the new theatrical year is hard to imagine.Though built for touring, as is evident from the utilitarian feel of Peter McKintosh's fan-shaped design, Gordon Greenberg's staging in an instant brings necessary brio and dash to the West End, supplanting the psychologically anguished "musical fable" that was Gypsy at this same playhouse for most of last year with Frank Loesser and co' Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You'll feel guilty for having bothered with a programme after seeing The Lorax, the Dr Seuss adaptation that puts saving the environment centre-stage at the Old Vic just as the recent climate change gathering in Paris has done on the world stage. Full of unimpeachably good intentions, the production is fun and frolicsome up to a point, and sometimes simply bewildering.A second Matilda it most certainly is not, even though the Vic is now in the care of that great musical's director, Matthew Warchus. But Max Webster's production offers sufficient invention to more than sustain a six-week run, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's hard not to invoke the B word - Barbra, that is, not Brice - and I speak as one who bunked off school to catch her at a midweek matinee when Funny Girl first played London almost 50 years ago. It was standing room only at the Prince of Wales Theatre but by then she was pretty much phoning in her performance, and only the thrill of that voice (smaller than one expected but laser-intense) carried her through. It's quite the reverse with the very talented Sheridan Smith, who is a funny girl and probably closer in spirit to the real Fanny Brice than Streisand could ever be. And with Read more ...
Marianka Swain
This new family musical, based on the popular 2003 Will Ferrell film, has rightly been censured for its extortionate seating prices, hosting the West End’s most expensive top-end tickets at £267.50 a pop – and that’s without the drinks, ice cream and £10 souvenir programme. So, is it worth it?In a word – no. This is a regifted hodgepodge, with Thomas Meehan and Bob Martin’s book brazenly name-checking its sources: Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol, White Christmas. There’s the workaholic who neglects his family and rejects Christmas celebration (Scrooge meets Hook, Mary Poppins et al Read more ...
Katie Colombus
A pop album drawn from a musical could be off-putting to some. Images of Glee spring to mind or a tweenypop version of Idina Menzel – both of which seem quite a departure from Sara Bareilles’ hugely popular hits "Love Song", "Gravity" or most recently, "Brave".But for her fourth studio album – a follow up to 2013’s The Blessed Unrest – Bareilles has taken tracks from the upcoming musical, Waitress, set to hit Broadway in April 2016, for which she wrote both the music and lyrics. The result is a bit of a pick ‘n’ mix: I know I will play my favourite couple of songs on repeat until I know all Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It trashed Olivia Newton-John’s film career, halted the movie-musical revival, and was so critically reviled it led to the creation of the Razzies. How, then, could the stage version of hubristic 1980 flop Xanadu become a 2007 Broadway hit? The answer, as illustrated by Paul Warwick Griffin’s sublimely silly Southwark Playhouse production, is to laugh at itself first.Adaptor Douglas Carter Beane retains the best of the original – John Farrar and ELO leader Jeff Lynne’s infectious pop/rock score – and lovingly spoofs the rest. The book’s absurd Ancient Greece/contemporary California mash-up Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Rents are going up, local businesses priced out, and the rich folk and hipsters are invading. That’s in Washington Heights, New York’s largely Dominican-American quarter, but it could as easily describe King’s Cross, one of multiple London areas undergoing gentrification. This Tony Award-winning musical from pioneering composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (currently ruling Broadway with Hamilton), which features an irresistible hip-hop, rap, pop and Latin fusion score, is propulsive entertainment with a resonant social conscience.Our guide to the Heights is Usnavi (Sam Mackay), whose bodega – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Kinks have turned 50 last and nagging talk of a reunion is still in the ether. In the absence of the real thing, there is a double-disc greatest hits album surfing the wave of latter-day Kinksmania. Meanwhile a kind of Kinks reunion stormed the West End in the shape of Sunny Afternoon, written by playwright Joe Penhall from an original story by Ray Davies.Taking the band’s glorious songbook as its soundtrack, the musical follows the Kinks from their first number one “You Really Got Me” through to the end of the 1960s when they were allowed back into America after a four-year ban caused by Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If nothing else, Stephen Sondheim’s best-known work will put you off pies; it will put you off barbers; and it may in the end put you off Sondheim. Popular though it seems to be with planners and programmers, it’s sluggish and heavy going as drama and thin gruel as music: three hours of clever musical patter, repetitive orchestral mechanisms, and slinky variations on the “Dies irae”. When you’ve seen one throat-slitting, one human pie-bake, you’ve seen them all. And when you’ve heard the Ballad at the start of Act 1 and the waltz at the end of it (“A little priest”), you’ve heard most of what Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a long old haul from the MGM musical to London Road. Alecky Blythe’s hugely original account of the murder in 2006 of five sex workers in Ipswich emerged from a set of interviews with local residents. At the National Theatre it grew into a verbatim musical with the addition of Adam Cork’s deftly knitted score. The stage version travelled to the big screen with Rufus Norris directing, and now makes it to the small screen.Television, in the shape of BBC drama Five Daughters (2010), is where the story of the murder victims was first told. London Road has widescreen moments, particularly at Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If the shoe fits, they say, wear it. But in truth there's always been a bit of a size differential between Kinky Boots, the modest urban Brit-flick set in a struggling shoe factory, and the Cyndi Lauper/Harvey Fierstein musical that it spawned, first on Broadway and now here. Lauper's score resides principally in the funk and spunk of cross-dressing catwalk glamour while the somewhat dowdy spirit of Northamptonshire - the vernacular of the piece - is barely hinted at in the "Price & Son Theme" of the opening number.But at least the show has, in one sense, "come home" and is no longer lost Read more ...
Richard Bratby
At the beginning of Act Two of John Savournin’s production of HMS Pinafore, the quarterdeck is in darkness. Kevin Greenlaw’s Captain Corcoran steps out of his cabin, downs a brandy stiffener, and launches into his melancholy lament to the moon. Woodwinds echo the ends of sighing phrases as the strings pluck their accompaniment: something about this sounds familiar. And as cymbals clash melodramatically and David Steadman, conducting, underlines the ominous chromatic rise and fall of the bass line in Little Buttercup’s fateful duet with the Captain, the target of Sullivan’s musical satire Read more ...